Not exactly, it's a service with unpredictable output. This isn't like a knife where you know what will happen depending on how you use it.

You can frame anything being "a tool". But if you want to stay within your logic, then this is a very specific "tool", it is supposed to directly interact with people, not machine to machine, and as such it can have consequences which are unpredictable. And no, human to human interaction is mostly NOT unpredictable, we act according to social norms and have common sense, otherwise you're not a proper human.

This is not a new issue but is heavily researched in the certifiable AI area. If you just turning million knobs randomly based on an architecture and the biased data you have, of course you don't really known what you are doing.

It really doesn’t matter what it ‘is’ or if it makes sense to speak of things in moral categories. There are plenty of ‘tools’ that are/should be restricted, from guns to Tucker Carlson.

It can obviously have some effect on the so-called ‘real world’, or people wouldn’t pour money into developing & using it. It would be a unique feat to be powerful with no chance of any of the effects being harmful.

From there, it’s just arithmetics: what harms and benefits do we expect with what probabilities, and how does this change depending on the distribution scheme?