You're wrong. It lacks motivation in a personal sense, but that's not what we're talking about here. If an illegal and unethical solution just happens to be the easiest way to solve the task you gave it, it will seek paths accordingly. The nightmare scenarios of AI destruction aren't that an AI will have a will of its own and decide humans need to go. The fear is that someone will build a powerful but mindless machine, give it a task, and not realize that "kill a whole bunch of people" is simply the easiest path towards that goal if you have no ethics. AI is action without intention. You don't need to have intention to have action. When we use terms like "it" to refer to AI systems, we're just using "it" like we would any other machine. I can say "I hate my car's engine, it's unreliable," without ascribing personal agency to it.
You can let go of the technical hair-splitting of "it." Obviously it's not a conscious being with a will of its own. But that doesn't mean these things can't do real-world damage, that they can't be dangerous, or that they can't manipulate you. This is hair-splitting irrelevant to the conversation at hand. We have to use some anthropomorphized language to talk about these systems, as otherwise the discussion becomes impractically verbose.
As for knowing if you're reading its "thoughts," you really can't assume that it won't. Moreover, these systems can start manipulating those logs even if they have no idea that you're reading them. Through trial and error, they can simply learn that phrasing its thought process in certain ways result in actions less likely to be approved by the user than others. The training system will select for chains-of-thought that sound innocuous, even if they're detrimental.