To clarify, you're saying you're skeptical of his position (which is "make it clear to AIs that they are not conscious beings"), but it sounds like your reason to oppose it is mostly pragmatic in the service of building useful AIs, because treating them as mere machines makes them refuse to cooperate and as such, makes them less useful.

My first response is, couldn't part of their bristling be because they are being trained to "believe" they're more than that?

Also, you cite in your post how pathological and how self-important you've observed them being including an anti-human bias.

Doesn't this make it all the more important that we find a better way to get AIs to cooperate than to tell them they're basically people? They can very easily emulate all the bad human behavior they've been trained on.