I've suspected that different periods of Replika was actually just this.

Like when they were offering dirty chat but using models that didn't allow it, that behind the scenes it was hooking you up with a Mechanical Turk guy sexting you.

There was certainly a degree of manual fuckery, like when the bots were sending their users links to stories about the Google guy claiming the AI was sentient.

That was 1,000% a human initiated campaign.