Any hammer you can hold

There is a correct way to hold a hammer, and it took hitting my hand enough times to edge on breaking it before I learned I was doing it wrong. Hold it close to the bottom of the handle. Loosen your grip, but not too much, just enough that you have control and fluidity. Let the swing happen at your elbow, let it travel from your shoulder. Let your whole body be part of the process. Let the hammer be an extension of you, part of your body. Like a bone grown outside the skin. Don’t look at it when you swing. Look at the nail. Breath. Don’t try to hit it, just hit it. Trust Yourself. Strike.

There’s a photo on my social media feed right now of a wealthy man pretending to be working class. As if he’s in a community theatre production of the music video for ‘Y.M.C.A” for just long enough that sweat will never stain his brow. He’s standing in the raw frame of a house in his pressed suit with perfect lines, holding a hammer and finishing nail up to a wooden stud that requires neither. His face pulled upwards by a lifeless little smile, no teeth, no muscle. He’s holding the hammer. His fingers asking to be struck. He looks like a child mentally preparing himself to bunt in T-Ball. The photos never capture the moment of contact, but I know exactly how it will end. A small bruise, and a stilted laugh, and then the hammer will be tossed to someone who knows what it is actually capable of.

Once, on a patio, In the early morning hours of a house party in my youth, I stumbled upon three bleary-eyed men standing around a log. They were playing a drinking game, the rudimentary goal of which was to drive a nail the fastest into this gnarled chunk of wood. The first to sink theirs dolled punishing drinks out to the others. Shots of fireball and Goldschläger, drinks people only have on a dare or when they’re trying to hurt the deepest parts of themselves. I was then an awkwardly built person, tall and unsure of my body, and I inspired no confidence with my frame. So I was an easy mark for this kind of scam, those that tests the body. I was invited to join with a nail placed for me next to others that were bent at awkward angles, the heads dented in abject frustration. I watched these drunk men of the early morning eye my size, watched them delight in their cleverness, drawing a waif such as me into their snare. One of them yelled go, and I drove my nail clean into the wood in one swift motion. The air left silent by stunned men who spend more time obsessing about power than they ever considered the fluidity of control.

This is the nature of a tool, which is only ever just a thing and nothing more. An item that exists in the world, that you might hold in your hand and learn to master, with tricks and secrets to its nature. It doesn’t matter how strong you might be. Without knowing how and what it does, what movement is required of the body to make it work, a tool will only ever make clumsy impact. It might be dangerous the first time you hold it, as a hammer is a benign and gentle thing until it is held, and only then does it become capable of destruction and reformation. A tool demands that you learn what it does, and what it might be capable of, and when all is mastered it is only ever an extension of the body. You are, in fact, learning what you can do. The tool is only there to assist with what work you are able to perform.

There was a time when my life was defined by tools. I had so many that I owned and obsessed over the right combination of boxes and bags to hold them all. I owned a truck just to haul them from building to building, and from town to endless town. I had tools for hyper-specific purposes, and others that were rudimentary. Some were bulky and brash, necessary when something just needed to be hit, or cut, or broken. I had drills, and bigger drills, that drank batteries like water in the winter months. All of them helped me do my job, but never did my job. All of them an extension of me, my arms and my elbows and shoulders. They could only ever build what I could, and destroy what I was capable of destroying.

They are trying to give the same distinction to AI. I see and read the word tool in rambling paragraphs evangelizing on the nature of these things. Claiming that they are for writers, and for editors, or everyone who strings words out onto the page. As if you can hold AI on the grip, near the base, and loosen your wrist just enough to know you have control. But this betrays the nature of tools, and humans, and ideas. It subverts the idea of creation, and thrives on unseen and unbidden destruction.

I am going to use words I don’t agree with to describe the actions of these things, and I want you to know that I understand. When I say “write”, I do not mean an AI writes, and when I say “create” I am drawing the outline of creation, but never filling it in. I don’t believe that AI writes or creates or provides anything of substance, but I have to describe what it pretends to do, and so we wade together into clumsy waters. Generative AI eats away at creation, it absorbs all it has been fed, and all it has taken from the world, and conjures a homunculus of ideas onto the page. When it writes, it writes with the shared language of thousands without guidance or reason and when it creates, it does so with the disparate passions and experiences of the same. AI is never wielded, it is only ever conjured and bidden, so that idle hands may claim creation from what these beasts have laid bare for them. This is not the action of a tool, as if a hammer is bidden and returns only when the walls are standing to show you where it placed all the studs and braces.

I have seen writers who perform their love of these things claim that they only use AI for the generation of ideas. Claim they have only ever ask it to lay out words and sentences, so they can sift through them and find what works. As if a house is built by first exploding before falling to the ground in ashen timbers. This is not the action of a tool, which asks you to learn how it feels in your hands, that hurts a little on first swing. That has secrets in it, that develop over time and become an instinctive action. Muscles that build in the body that know how to swing, and cut, and lift.

A tool never does the work for you, as a tool is incapable of doing anything unless the hand on its grip can make it happen. A hammer will never build you a home, even if it has done so before. It will betray you if you try to let it do the work for you. There are those that call AI a tool because they want to pretend that there is labour in what they have claimed, that they can wave at the results spat out at them from the ravenous beasts hidden behind innocuous app icons on their control docks. Their justifications of it only doing what they ask it to do, as if there is choice in the matter, ring hollow. If it were a tool, this would be true, but AI is an erratic and changing thing. Mercurial and always feeding. It is growing, and changing, and absorbing with each new keystroke. Feeding off our waterways and our towns just so it can deposit books that no one will read, and music that will never sing.

My tools are different now, a writer is a far different life than a glazier. I have a laptop, and an iPad, and multiple keyboards. My favourite, a mechanical one that reminds me of learning the home row in typing class on an Apple Classic 2. That is what I write with most days, today even, and each click of the key is a loud and expressive reminder of a task. Every letter, every space, every swiftly clicked backspace is done by me, with purpose and desire. I have a notebook, and three other notebooks, and pens I prefer when writing notes or longhand sentences. These are tools, and they could no more write a book than the breeze moving our curtains that block the sun on warm days. It’s only when they are held by me that they might be capable of creation, a tool that is only ever an extension of the body.