It think Star Trek (or was it Orville) already explored this idea actually - there's an engineer working on improving the warp engine and they end up building an AI simulation of the original architect and collaborating on the work. It's then weird later because they meet the real architect and there's a imbalanced friendship/ romance with awkward consent threads....

The hologram from Star Trek is in these two episodes:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booby_Trap_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy%27s_Child

I was looking for the associate Orville one, but my memories of these shows overlap and merge at times.