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.

How does it work? Simple. A robot has to be smart enough to create its own identity, profile and following on the world’s most popular social networks. And I’m not just talking followers and friends – they’re easy to acquire, even for computer programs – but real authority, as measured by organic factors like retweets on Twitter, or the number of people in Facebook groups it sets up.

I’m not sure I’m going to get research funding for this any time soon, but the point I’m trying to make is that artificially creating a legitimate online profile (Not a stock picture of a Russian woman with breasts that exert gravitational pull on objects around them) on social networks could be a greater test of human nature’s complexity than a simple tête à tête. All the ways we interact with each other across a whole range of services would be a much more impressive task to emulate convincingly.

What got me thinking about this wasn’t the absurd number of spambots (or twammers, if you will) on Twitter, but an article in Wired about a man who’s rigged his home appliances up to the micro blogging service to communicate their power consumption rates. It’s a fantastic way to save money on bills, all orchestrated through TweetDeck of all things, and it struck me as a constructive way for machines and robots to make use of social networks, rather than merely to push out badly spelled solutions to problems in the bedroom.

If you’ll forgive this bit of Nostradamus mulling, I’d like to hazard a guess at one of the future paths for social media: automation. I don’t simply mean users’ profiles sending generic greetings to each other like they do now, but software taking advantage of historical and user data to fine tune and pick out tweets, Facebook status updates, Diggs and whatever else, and deliver the best, the most relevant, to us, whether on the phone when you wake up, computer screen when you sit down at your desk, or TV when you slump down on the sofa.

I already get automated recommendations from Stumbleupon, and Digg is obviously based on the thumbs up of others. The creation is still up to us, but could we see AI smart enough to make choices on social media for us to consume, to the point where we trust it to, rather than wading through everything ourselves? As a journalist, I don’t think so, but without my hack hat, I’ve got my fingers crossed.