I could also kill you with a pencil. But comparing LLM to a gun just because 0.00000001% of all "AI"-talks lead to suicide? While probably a very large percentage of guns lead to death, because that's basically their primary use-case.

An LLM is not sentient nor intelligent. It tells you what you want to hear and makes tons of mistakes. It's a tool that certainly has more useful applications than guns have.

So is ai merely a tool?

Also yes.

I don't have any concerns with machine learning as technology. I do have concerns with how many corporations and some people are using it, both in training models and using them.