There is no relevant distinction.

I hate missiles for the damage they do regardless of the technology used to point them at the target.

I hate cars for the damage they do regardless of the technology used to point them at the target.

There’s a difference of intent (missiles get aimed at people while self driving cars hopefully get aimed away from people).

There’s a difference of failure modes (when a self-driving car fails it will often hit a person while a failing missile will miss a person).

But theres no reason to hate machine-learning for that, any more there is a reason to hate gyroscopes or lidar or other tools which are also used in guidance systems.

If someone had decided that a simple accelerometer were “good enough” to unleash self-driving cars on the general public without consideration for the damage caused, people would be upset and rightly so, but not because of the specific technology itself.

Edit: changed AI to “machine-learning”