I have written about the subject of auto-voting bots (and how to improve Hive by adjusting the incentives to auto-vote) here and here.

However, to the best of my understanding, the upcoming hardfork (HF25) will change the curation incentives such that auto-voting will likely be redirected in a way that will actually be more beneficial than harmful (imho).

I discussed my understanding of the HF25 implications here