wtf is up with bots...

is anyone else freaked out by bots on social media?? theres something so inexplainably unnerving about them. why are they everywhere and what is their purpose? ever since around mid to late 2020 they seem to slowly be taking over the internet, killing off the active userbase of each site they take over entirely. i first encountered them on tiktok in around 2020 when i had a couple of them randomly follow me. i remember seeing a couple of videos talking about them saying not to interact with them cause they were linked to something sketchy or whatever. since then, theyve seemed to completely vanish off of tiktok and move on to other sites like twitter (im not fucking calling it x i dont care) where they seem to be the only things you see on there, you cant scroll for 5 minutes without coming across atleast 1. i just dont understand. is there people behind the accounts. if so, do they get paid, is there something they stand to gain from this? if not,  where do they even find the photos they use, do they take random peoples pictures or are they ai generated? and what controls them, do they just spawn in, did someone create them? either way, theres still something kind of eerie about them. to me they almost feel like ghosts of the internet, empty shells of what used to be that still try to reach out to the living with intentions largely unknown to us.