I wish to defend the hammers analogy. I don't know, our whole world is analogies, isn't it? Plus it's funny, that's worth something right?
Yeah, LLMs are "just a tool", like a hammer. Like a nuclear bomb. Like a dictionary. Like government. Like a can opener.
It doesn't mean anything.
The reason we reach for analogies is because they are easy and satisfying, not because they are effective. Once we make an analogy, the conversation essentially just becomes about litigating all the differences between X and Y, rather than actually talking about the original topic.