Another trick it could use is using chatbots most of the time, but swaping them out for real people only for the moments you are actually talking about deep stuff. Maybe you have deep emotional conversations with your family a few hours a week. Maybe once per year, you have a 10 hour intense discussion with Eliezer. That's not a lot out of 24 hours per day, the vast majority of the computing power is still going into simulating your brain.

Edit: another; the chatbots might have some glaring failure modes if you say the wrong thing, unable to handle edge cases, but whenever you encounter then the sim is restored from a backup 10 min earlier and the specific bug is manually patched. If this went on for long enough the chatbots would become real people, and also bloat slow, but it hasn't happened yet. or maybe the patches that dont come up in long enoguh get commented out.