Is your best buddy a bot? For many people, that answer is "I don't know." Utilizing image and text generation, many media aggregation & social media sites (e.g. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) are awash with a wave of "artificial humans" virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. Their profile pictures are that of people indistinguishable from you or me, and they engage in very coherent conversations. They have inconspicuous usernames and behave rationally. Yet there are no humans behind any one of these accounts. It's a silent mass passing of the Turing Test.

On dating sites, folk fall in love with those who have never physically existed.

On forums, internet friendships are forged between man and machine.

You can interact with many users without immediately knowing who or what they really are.

And once this becomes known, many may decide they do not care. If they felt it was real, even if the other party was a bundle of math equations, then that's all that matters. But for many others, there's a visceral sense of betrayal and distrust. Any random account may be artificial, while only the most spirited and obvious can escape doubt. Yet even this may not last forever, for media synthesis is still advancing as a field— in five years, some surmise, even if an account posts a video of themselves talking into a camera, you will doubt it is what it is. What you're seeing and what you're hearing may never be what is actually happening.

Bots are used for more than just toying with friendships and passing the Turing Test. As far back as 2019, foreign agents used AI-generated tools as a means of espionage. Moral guardians & political experts will bring up fears of advanced bots grooming the youth and elderly towards certain paths, of phishing bots run by the malevolent to gain your trust— and then your data. Such neural-enhanced bots are not obvious in their actions.

Memes and trends are created, promoted, and killed by these neural-enhanced bots. If someone with enough computational resources wants to make a certain dead musical genre, fashion trend, or dangerous fad a thing, they need only flood social media with these ultra-realistic bots commenting upon this and wait until news organizations and popular blogs (some of the latter of which may also be bot-run) run with the story and gets the ball rolling. Likewise, if someone else hates a trend that they feel has gone on too long, or a particular movie, or a particular band, or anything in culture in general, they may employ these bots to influence the wider collective consciousness. For all our hyper-individualistic media, humans still wish to fit in. Give us the opportunity to be whoever we want to be, and we will almost always choose to be like everyone else. Advanced bots are perfect for exploiting this mass psychological quirk. Many claim they already have for the the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections (among most others in the Western world), and yet these were utilizing bots of an older sort— those which lacked natural language understanding and were better suited for spam. That is, those bots with which most people are familiar.