Yes, journalists have already played around with this: https://medium.com/living-with-artificial-intelligence/one-day-with-replika-and-why-itll-never-work-out-between-us-29f7f5c44418

I gather the real-life concern was that in practice some users were 'abusing' and tormenting their Replikas and trolling about it online -- and while that doesn't actually hurt the program, The Powers That Be were worried about what it might do to the mental state of the people who were enjoying it.

(Incidentally, I understand that the claim that "If it's an assistant, then it's female" is actually an urban legend; early artificial assistants were female because the vast majority of the available recorded voice data on which they were trained was female, for reasons varying between female-voiced announcements allegedly being easier to distinguish in a noisy cockpit, and artificial voice recognition systems finding it easier to separate and identify phonemes as spoken by women. For what it's worth, speech generating software like eSpeak and Dragon NaturallySpeaking historically defaulted to *male* voices, because the programmers were male and saw that as the norm -- not because they treated their computers as subservient women.)