Thanks, Matt! Great to have this conversation up on meta. This would be a pretty neat use of Discourse-automation! As of now there is no script to create new topics using automation, I think.
I like the idea of using topics in a category, with all the benefits and privileges that come with categories. So you can stage a series of new topics to be posted in a specific category that come from another category. This could be useful for icebreakers but also for other activities, like an asynchronous forum-based course, or onboarding.
I believe this idea has been suggested for canned replies as well. The current canned replies UI kinda falls apart when you have many canned replies, or when you want to give people in specific roles access to managing and using their own canned replies.