I was the victim of cyber-bullying in its purest form. It seemed the Internet itself was having a pop at me.

See, I’d spent months carefully setting up several feeds, filters and processes to fling nuggets of information from camera or computer to website and across to Flickr and Twitter. But I hadn’t accounted for my own human error.

In the midst of testing a new liveblog platform I inadvertently published a test post. It’s an easy (and very human) mistake to make and should’ve been quick to fix, but my network of co-dependent automatons are merciless. Before I could pull down the first post, they’d grabbed it in their info-hungry claws, minced it into different forms and pushed it down several of the Internet’s other tubes, leaving me with a trail of digital debris spread far and wide.

Lesson learnt, I won’t be blindly creating posts any more, but it begs the question: how much of modern publishing is automated? From auto-generated newsletters to the carousels and banners being palmed off as “content.”

Is our reliance on robots killing creativity, or genuinely saving us time?

I still use plenty of automation: Batch processes in Photoshop, shortcuts galore in other apps, and that’s before Google Alerts has tipped me off to new web pages based on my keywords of choice. But now I’m more wary of giving robots the ability to “create” anything of their own accord.

Have you been the victim of over-active automatons while trying to trim monotony out of your working day? I’d be interested to know.