If you use Facebook, you might have noticed in the past few weeks a number of bizarre posts from an app called What Would I Say. Implemented by a team of grad students during a hackathon in Princeton less than three weeks ago, it is the latest Internet trend. What Would I Say is yet another addition to the non-seriousness of online social networks. But worse yet, it highlights a technology that could finally delete the possibility of genuine online interaction.

In a nutshell, What Would I Say is a bot that screens your Facebook posts, builds a few probabilistic models for a sequence of words and then outputs the most likely sequence. The idea is not new — there is an equivalent for Twitter called That Can Be My Next Tweet.

So far, these apps have mainly been a source of entertainment, producing ironic sentences such as “We can’t do it” from Barack Obama’s posts, but there are already attempts to use the technology seriously. According to a BBC article published last week, Google just patented a bot to mimic a person’s behavior in online social networks.

That’s disappointing. While the technology behind social bots does have high scientific value — mainly in the context of natural language processing — attempts to seriously turn these ideas into products are repugnant. Not only are these models still in rudimentary stages, they threaten to make the Internet much less humane than it already is.

Few people discuss important issues with their friends online. In conversations with strangers on web forums, interactions can often be hostile. These factors make it difficult to engage in any meaningful online interactions. In the future, if we begin to see these interactions created by a compu-ter algorithm, the possibility for genuine online conversations will be eroded further — to the point where there is none.

Twenty years ago, Peter Steiner published a cartoon in The New Yorker in which one dog says to another “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” On tomorrow’s Internet, nobody will know if they are talking to a bot. How good would it feel to discover the nice birthday message sent by your crush on Facebook was actually written by a bot? Automatic birthday emails from local businesses are already annoying enough.

Even now, insincere conversations are carried out by the same people who speak this way in the real world. We don’t need bots to further erode genuine conversations. The technology should be used to find and organize data. Having it mimic our social behavior online will only cause the social aspect of the Internet to vanish.