Meet the 24-year-old Ottawa software engineer who runs a MAGA bot
If you've been on the social media site X recently to wade into the debate over the New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, you may have come across CityDeskNYC.
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The account, which is run by an artificial intelligence bot, spits out more than 1,000 posts a day, responding to mentions of the Democratic nominee for mayor. The posts disparage Mamdani and his proposed policies while praising some of his political opponents.
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But the person behind the bot isn't in New York City, or even in the United States. He lives in Ottawa.
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Saihajpreet Singh is a 24-year-old software engineer who graduated from Carleton University two years ago and CityDeskNYC is just one of his AI bots looking to reshape political public relations.
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Last year, Singh, who has been coding since he was seven years old, built an AI bot called DOGEai that posts around 2,000 times a day on X, with a right-wing MAGA flair and an output no human could match. DOGEai, which has amassed more than 127,000 followers, has criticized Democrats and applauded Donald Trump and his supporters, attracting retweets by the American president and his former ally Elon Musk.
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For Singh, CityDeskNYC is a proof of concept AI bot that he hopes to monetize by eventually selling it to Mamdani's political opponents.
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'Many people hate me,' Singh told the Ottawa Citizen.
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Singh's accounts are part of an army of AI bots that have created an information ecosystem in support of Trump and the Republican Party on X. In the lead-up to last year's presidential election, researchers at Clemson University identified a network of more than 680 AI-generated bot accounts on X that were pushing Trump's agenda.
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Singh, who moved to Ottawa in 2019 from Minnesota, claims he is not a propagandist, but a 'technologist' who wants to show how AI can be leveraged for public relations. He said he would be open to working for campaigns across the political spectrum.
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He added that he 'does not discriminate' and that 'the technology can help anyone.' But his known accounts have targeted progressive politicians and sought to aid conservative ones so far.
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