I have ollama responding to SMS spam texts. I told it to feign interest in whatever the spammer is selling/buying. Each number gets its own persona, like a millennial gymbro or 19th century British gentleman.
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I had a similar project a few years back that used OSX automations and Shortcuts and Python to send a message everyday to a friend. It required you to be signed in to iMessage on your MacBook.
Than was a send operation, the reading of replies is not something I implemented, but I know there is a file somewhere that holds a history of your recent iMessages. So you would have to parse it on file update and that should give you the read operation so you can have a conversation.
Very doable in a few hours unless something dramatic changed with how the messages apps works within the last few years.