Headlines about internet bots tend to bring to mind dark visions of our online spaces being infiltrated with fake news, spam or some other murky form of fraudulent activity. But might there be benevolent bots out there, too? The engineer and coder Andrei Taraschuk certainly thinks so. He presides over a network of nearly 500 ‘fan’ bots for artists and museums. Bots first became a general talking point soon after the US election in 2016, after being identified as the agents of foreign interference and online disinformation campaigns. Twitter has since cracked down on fake accounts although, like many tech scapegoats, bots are neutral agents with the potential to be manipulated. What bots do offer is a useful way to automatically post information updates, real or fake, at a rate humans can’t keep up with. In the more optimistic age of the early 2010s, accounts such as @everyword, @deepquestionbot and @tinycarebot were celebrated examples of creative programming and actively enco