Consider that it might be harmful to humans to think of their tools as animated and moral because it allows them to maintain an image of themselves as being highly moral while still performing bad actions with no ill conscience.

I used to enjoy playing "good" characters in the fallout games, as it's kind of a pleasant way of pretending that I do good things in the larger world.

And, to be fair, recognizing my need to be validated by helping folks has helped a lot in my personal life; being able to see hat I actually am getting out of helping folks has helped me to set firmer boundaries. It's possible that you could look at those games as a kind of "moral instruction" as would be the case with this proposition from the OP.

But the game itself is just "ethics porn".

There is no actual good that comes from me not stealing from NPCs or from taking up some weird political crusade. I'm not actually doing anything among my fellow humans and, most importantly, there is no actual cost to me.

Further, I don't mean to make a casual comparison to what folks might get from porn and what folks might get from thinking about their interactions with AI- I think that in the same way that if someone took their cues about how to have sex solely from porn, they might have a harder time interacting with real humans.

If I solely took my cues about how to help folks in the world from the heroes of highly scripted video games I would have a very difficult time interacting with the people around me and my expectations would be very out of sync with the world around me.

In the case of AI, the meatspace give-and-take between people where we requires a lot of subtle things- respect, enjoyment, equality, reciprocity. It might be just as bad to burn compute building some reciprocal sycophancy, which might also be considered just as much of a harm as practicing cruelty on these agents.