Meet the 24-year-old Ottawa software engineer who runs a MAGA bot
Saihajpreet Singh's bots are waging an online battle against progressive politicians in the U.S.
Article content
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.
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.
Recommended Videos
tap here to see other videos from our team.
Meet the 24-year-old Ottawa software engineer who runs a MAGA bot Back to video
tap here to see other videos from our team.
But the person behind the bot isn’t in New York City, or even in the United States. He lives in Ottawa.
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.
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.
For Singh, CityDeskNYC is a proof of concept AI bot that he hopes to monetize by eventually selling it to Mamdani’s political opponents.
“Many people hate me,” Singh told the Ottawa Citizen.
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.
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.
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.
AI bot master as a side hustle
Singh first launched the AI behind DOGEai as a way to scrutinize legislation that was working its way through Congress during the latter half of then-president Joe Biden’s term in office, when the Democrats controlled the Senate and Republicans held the House.
Singh, whose family and friends live in the United States, said he originally asked the AI to break down a 1,500-page spending bill introduced in 2024. He posed simple questions about how the bill would spend money and impact citizens.
But Singh and the friends who worked with him on the project thought the data they got back was “boring” and dry.
“So, we were like, what if we make this humorous and have things have a particular stance on particular topics, right?” Singh said.
That’s when DOGEai was born on X. Singh also later created a Substack newsletter with posts every few days of AI-generated political cartoons.
The response was explosive, Singh said. The posts on DOGEai soon reached millions of impressions each day with help from Musk and Trump.
“Even the sitting president retweeted one of the posts from DOGEai, so the scale is pretty big,” he said. “I was just shocked when I saw that happen.”
Singh said that the AI bots are his side projects and he currently works as the head of growth and product engineering at a software company called the Guild. He is also a growth engineer for Anyscale, an AI company.
Running the bots is not cheap at around $9,000 to $10,000 in operational costs a month, according to Singh.
He says he has received racist comments and death threats “every couple days” for creating DOGEai. But it’s not stopping Singh, who is “actively exploring” other social media sites such as TikTok, Instagram and Threads.
The future of bots in political public relations
Singh says that his bots rely heavily on social media, where many voters get their information.
Still, he does not think such AI bots should be used exclusively for political campaigns, even though both of his projects revolve around American politics.
“It’s a tool for public relations teams. It can help you scale your operations like never before, right?” Singh said.
“With this kind of thing, (you) can get influences that you want, you can send your message to the world.”
Singh says he has received interest from political campaigns and public relations firms about his bots.
“There’s interest from every part of the world on this type of thing,” Singh said. “You can see the scale of this thing, how good it can get, as long as we have good guard rails.”
Our website is your destination for up-to-the-minute news, so make sure to bookmark our homepage and sign up for our newsletters so we can keep you informed.
Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion. Please keep comments relevant and respectful. Comments may take up to an hour to appear on the site. You will receive an email if there is a reply to your comment, an update to a thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information.