It is always _by definition_ a game between humans where computers are just tools.
At least as long as AGI does not happen…
Recall that things are true "by definition" if they're not true for any other reason; you're free to define yourself out of the race against the machines, but the real world need not pay attention to your definition!
Computers are "just tools" is certainly true, but I find it harder to automatically agree that the programs running on them are "just tools". Here is a rather bad analogy which is suggestive: in school we learn that there are seven features which are necessary and to some extent sufficient to identify a living organism ("movement, respiration, sensitivity to surroundings, growth, reproduction, excretion, nutrition"). Programs certainly move (thanks to Kubernetes, for example), are sensitive to their surroundings (think of self-healing clusters or load-shedding), grow (scale up in response to demand), and excrete (cleanup jobs on databases). They don't respire, but then that was only ever a contingent feature of how life evolved on Earth; they don't take in nutrients unless you really stretch the analogy; they don't currently reproduce, although LLMs being able to code means it's only a matter of time before an LLM can train another LLM (even Claude 3 Opus is able to train small ML models). All this is to say that the word "tool" is a very poor description of what an LLM is: "tool" calls to mind things which don't have any of those lifelike properties, whereas even large non-intelligent software systems such as Kubernetes have many of those properties.
It is going to happen by definition - people by definition want more than they have today and want to solve unsolved engineering problems ("problems" that machines can solve are simply not problems anymore).
The only way it can end is creation of some overwhelming intelligence (AGI) that would govern (or some might say: enslave) people so that their demands are controlled.