A few Thursdays ago, I woke up at almost 4:30am. with a stunning DM on Instagram.
Rizzbot, a child-sized humanoid robot built by Unitree Robotics, has a massive following on social media — more than 1 million TikTok followers and more than half a million followers on Instagram — he had sent me a picture: he was flipping me off.
Without words. No explanation. Just a robot with a raised middle finger.
Although I was shocked, a sinking feeling meant I could guess why. A few weeks ago, Rizzbot — or the person who manages his Instagram account — and I chatted about a potential story. I found the account interesting: a humanoid walking the streets of Austin wearing Nike dunks and a cowboy hat. It is known for baking, but also for flirting and having a good time. The name Rizz comes from the slang word Gen Z root for a gift.
I was intrigued by the growing popularity of the account. Humans are usually uncomfortable with humanoids. There are privacy concerns and fears of job displacement. Online, people insult them, mostly calling them “clunkers.” In the world of robotics, meanwhile, experts are debating what they will be best suited to do.
I saw Rizzbot as a role model, making people feel comfortable interacting with a humanoid.
Rizzbot agreed to an interview, so I began reaching out to experts to discuss the future of humanoids in preparation for a story. Two weeks after my initial DM with Rizzbot, I told him I would finally send him some interview questions the following Monday or Tuesday.
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But life happened and I missed my own deadline. I was finally prepared to send the questions first thing on Thursday, and I thought it’s no big deal.
Too late. In the early hours of Wednesday night, Rizzbot sent this photo. The message is clear: You missed your point, so shut up.
I didn’t give up. I apologized to the robot (or human?) for the delay and promised to send questions first thing during office hours. But when I tried a few hours later, I got “user not found”.
The bot had blocked me.
Did I enable a fail safe?
My friends thought it was hilarious that I got removed and blocked by Rizzbot, since for weeks all I talked about was how excited I was to do this story.
“LOL Rizzbot roasted you,” a friend texted me.
“YOU’RE DEALING WITH A ROBOT LOLOLOL,” said another. I reached out to Rizzbot on TikTok, a move a friend called desperate. But what else could I do? I had pitched the story to my editor, spent hours researching, and — despite this beef — Rizzbot would still be of interest to TechCrunch’s tech-savvy readers.
While my friends were laughing, I entered a state of melancholy. Not only was my story dead, but now I was the girl blocked by a dancing robot.
My colleague Amanda Silberling offered to help me. He reached out to the Rizzbot account to ask why I was banned. Rizzbot gave a blunt answer: “Rizzbot blocks like it roots — smoothly, confidently and with zero regrets.” He then sent her the same middle finger photo he sent me. I thought: Wow, I wasn’t even special enough for a unique twist.
But then a friend had a scary thought I hadn’t even considered. “That was not a human answer. I fear for you.” It seems I had already made my first enemy a robot and the AI revolution had just begun.
Or did I? Am I really arguing with a human?
I found out that Rizzbot’s name is actually Jake the Robot.
Its owner is an anonymous YouTuber and biochemist, according to reports. The robot itself is a standard Model Unitree G1 — made in Hangzhou, China — and anyone can buy one for $16,000 to over $70,000.
Rizzbot was trained by Kyle MorgensteinPhD in UT Austin’s robotics lab. He worked with a team for about three weeks, teaching the robot how to dance and move its limbs. While much of the robot’s behavior is pre-programmed, it is operated by a remote control, with its real owner, obviously not Morgenstein, commanding it nearby.
If I had to guess how the technology behind the bot works—after talking to Malte F. Jung, an associate professor at Cornell University who studied information science—one triggers the bot’s behaviors, and a picture is taken of whoever interacts with the bot, run through ChatGPT or some other LLM, and then a text-to-speech is used to flirt with the person.
“The robot turns the script on humans abusing the robots,” Jung told me. “Now the robot abuses the people. The product here is performance.”
Morgenstein told other outlets that Rizzbot’s real owner just likes to entertain people, he likes to show the joy that humanoids can bring.
It’s unclear who manages the Rizzbot social media accounts, though when Rizzbot sent this photo to Silberling, it also sent an error message — likely an accident — about running out of GPU memory. The message indicated that an AI agent is possibly involved in the operation of this account and may be automatically generating DM responses. He also mentioned that the Rizzbot only has 48GB of memory.
“What makes you sure you were ever human?” My coder friend asked me about the Instagram account manager.
In the age of artificial intelligence, someone capable of training a bot is probably capable of hooking up an LLM with an Instagram DM. My block could even be fail-safe, my coder friend said, meaning I automatically activated it by sending DMs in the wee hours of the morning — even if it was a reply.
But there are some signs that a man is involved in managing Rizzbot’s social media: There were typos in his initial DM reply when I first asked for an interview.
However, if Rizzbot doesn’t tell me if his social media manager is another bot (which seems unlikely given our beef), I’ll probably never know. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
“If they charged $50,000 for a bot and a few thousand for a 48GB memory machine, I wouldn’t put anything past that,” my coder friend pointed out. “They are clearly committed to the piece.”
It’s still robot brain rot
Rizzbot’s TikTok page alone has garnered more than 45 million views. One video shows the Rizzbot chasing people through the streets, while another sees it run into a pole and fall into the middle of the road. A viral video, possibly altered by AI, shows Rizzbot being hit by a car.
“It looks hilarious, honestly,” a founder friend told me, calling the viral videos “robot brain rot.” He said the artificial intelligence is rudimentary, but the robot premise is a “funny mix” of internet humor – or absurdity – humor and the levity that’s missing from a lot of social media these days. “Interact with people in a new way.”
However, my Rizzbot hole still got me thinking about the role of hominins in our society. Every sci-fi movie I’ve ever watched — from “Blade Runner” to “I, Robot” has blown me away. How scared should I be now that I’ve made my first humanoid enemy?
“Performance seems to be really the big use case for these kinds of robots,” Jung told me, adding that the Rizzbot was “like a modern version of street performance with a hand puppet.”
“Often, hand puppets are insidious,” he continued.
In addition to Rizzbot, it was mentioned in the Spring Festival performance in China, where the humanoids he performed folk dance next to peopleand in San Francisco, meanwhile, people head to the boxing ring to watch robots trade jabs.
“Robots will become the main mass-market entertainers, showrunners, dancers, singers, comedians and companions,” Dima Gazda, founder of robotics company Esper Bionics, told me, adding that humans will become specialized, top talent. “As robots gain grace and emotional intelligence, they will blend into performances and interactive experiences better than humans.”
Fortunately, right now, dancing robots seem difficult to scale up en masse, according to Jen Apicella, executive director at the Pittsburgh Robotics Network. So I don’t have to worry about this beef escalating into, say, a legion of dancing, squealing robots physically appearing on my doorstep. Not that such a thought occurred to me.
It’s been over a week since I got blocked and I think back to the joy I found watching Rizzbot chase people down the streets. My favorite video showed a woman twering on Rizzbot. A crowd formed around the sight. The people seemed genuinely amused, itching, perhaps, for their own moment to poke at a robot.
I always joked to my friends that I wanted to keep the robots on my side in case the revolution came. But even as I wrote this article, I almost ran into another AI beef — this time with Meta AI, which I’d never used before. I accidentally started a conversation with Meta AI while searching for my old conversations with Rizzbot on Instagram.
Meta’s bot replied, “Son, what’s a good reputation? You callin’ me Rizzbot? 🤣 What’s poppin?”
I decided it was time to log off.
