A few Thursdays ago, I woke up at almost 4:30 to a dizzying message on Instagram.
Rizzbot, a child-sized humanoid robot created by Unitree Robotics that is hugely popular on social media – over 1 million followers on TikTok and more than half a million followers on Instagram – he sent me a photo: he was pissing me off.
No words. No explanation. Just a robot with a raised middle finger.
Although I was shocked, the sinking feeling meant I could guess why. A few weeks ago, we talked to Rizzbot – the person who runs his Instagram account – about a possible story. I found the case interesting: a humanoid walking the streets of Austin wearing Nike pants and a cowboy hat. He is known for frying, but also flirting and having fun. The name Rizz comes from a Generation Z slang word rizz for charisma.
I was intrigued by the growing popularity of the account. People usually don't feel comfortable around humanoids. There are privacy concerns and fear of changing jobs. People are hurling insults at them online, calling them “buzzers” in particular. Meanwhile, in the world of robotics, experts are debating what they will be best suited for.
I saw Rizzbot as a role model that made people feel comfortable interacting with a humanoid.
Rizzbot agreed to an interview, so I started reaching out to experts to discuss the future of humanoids in preparation for the story. Two weeks after my first interview with Rizzbot, I told him that 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 ready to submit the questions on Thursday morning and thought it was no big deal.
Too late. In the early hours of Wednesday evening, Rizzbot uploaded this photo. The message is clear: You broke your word, so get lost.
I didn't give up. I apologized to the robot (or its human?) for the delay and promised to send the questions immediately during working hours. However, when I tried a few hours later, I got the message “User not found.”
The robot blocked me.
Have I activated the failsafe?
My friends thought it was funny that Rizzbot rejected and blocked me because for weeks all I talked about was how excited I was to do this story.
“LOL Rizzbot fried you,” one friend wrote to me.
“YOU LOVE ROBOT LOLOLOL,” said another. I reached out to Rizzbot on TikTok, which one of my friends described as desperate. But what else could I do? I pitched this story to my editor, spent many hours researching, and – despite these disagreements – Rizzbot would still be interesting to tech-loving TechCrunch readers.
While my friends laughed, I became depressed. Not only was my story dead, but now I was also the girl who had been blocked by a dancing robot.
My friend Amanda Silberling offered to help me. She contacted the Rizzbot account to ask why I was blocked. Rizzbot gave a terse answer: “Rizzbot blocks like it fucks – smoothly, confidently and without remorse.” He then sent her the same middle finger photo he sent me. I thought, Wow, I wasn't even special enough to… unique flip-off.
But then one of my friends suggested a terrifying thought that I hadn't even considered. “It wasn't a human reaction. I'm afraid for you.” Looks like I've already made my first robot enemy, and the AI revolution has only just begun.
Or me? Was I really arguing with a human?
I found out that Rizzbot's real name is Jake the Robot.
Its owner is an anonymous YouTuber and biochemist, according to reports. The robot itself is standard Unitree G1 model — are made in Hangzhou, China — and anyone can make it buy one from $16,000 to over $70,000.
Rizzbot was coached by Kyle Morgensteincandidate in the UT Austin Robotics Laboratory. He worked with the team for about three weeks, teaching the robot to dance and move its limbs. Although most of the robot's behavior is programmed, it is controlled by a remote control and is commanded by its real owner, apparently not Morgenstein.
If I had to guess how the technology behind the robot works – after talking to Malte F. Jung, an associate professor at Cornell University who studied computer science – someone triggers the robot's behavior and a photo is taken of the person interacting with the robot, viewed through ChatGPT or another LLM, and then a text-to-speech function is used to roast or flirt with this person.
“The robot flips the script on humans using robots,” Jung told me. “Now the robot starts abusing people. The product is efficiency.”
Morgenstein told other media outlets that Rizzbot's actual owner simply enjoys entertaining people and showing the joy that humanoids can bring.
It's unclear who runs Rizzbot's social media accounts, although when Rizzbot sent this photo to Silberling, he also sent an error message – possibly the result of an accident – regarding low GPU memory. The message indicated that an AI agent is likely involved in running this account, perhaps automatically generating DM replies. It was also pointed out that Rizzbot only has 48GB of memory.
– How can you be sure it was ever a person? my developer friend asked me about an Instagram account manager.
In the age of artificial intelligence, someone who can train a robot will probably be able to combine LLM with DM on Instagram. My lock might even have been secure, my developer friend said, meaning I automatically triggered it by sending a DM in the wee hours of the morning – even if it was a reply.
However, there are some hints that a human is involved in running Rizzbot's social media: there were typos in the initial DM reply when I first asked for an interview.
Still, unless Rizzbot tells me whether its social media manager is another bot (which seems unlikely given the problems we're having), I'll probably never know. Maybe it doesn't matter.
“If they got $50,000 for a bot and a few thousand for a 48GB machine, I wouldn't put anything over them,” noted a programmer friend of mine. “They are clearly committed to this piece.”
It's still robot brain rot
Rizzbot's TikTok page alone has received over 45 million views. One video shows Rizzbot chasing people on the streets, while another shows it running into a pole and falling into the middle of the street. A viral video, possibly altered by artificial intelligence, shows Rizzbot getting hit by a car.
“Honestly, it seems funny,” one of the founders' friends told me, calling the viral videos “robot brain rot.” He said the artificial intelligence is primitive, but the robot's premise is a “funny combination” of online dank – or absurdist – humor and lightheartedness that's missing from much of social media today. “He interacts with people in innovative ways.”
However, my Rizzbot rabbit hole still had me thinking about the role of humanoids in our society. Every sci-fi movie I've ever watched, from “Blade Runner” to “I, Robot,” came back to me with bated breath. How scared should I be now that I've created my first humanoid enemy?
“It seems that with these kinds of robots, the most important application is efficiency,” Jung told me, adding that Rizzbot is “like a modern version of a street puppet performer.”
“Often puppets are mischievous,” he continued.
In addition to Rizzbot, he mentioned an appearance at the Spring Festival in China, where humanoids performed a folk dance next to peopleand meanwhile in San Francisco people go to the boxing ring to watch the robots exchange blows.
“Robots will become mainstream mass artists, performers, dancers, singers, comedians and companions,” Dima Gazda, founder of the robotics company Esper Bionics, told me, adding that humans will become a niche, the ultimate talent. “As robots gain grace and emotional intelligence, they will become better at blending into performances and interactive experiences than humans.”
According to Jen Apicella, executive director of the Pittsburgh Robotics Network, currently dancing robots seem difficult to scale on a mass scale. So I don't have to worry about this argument escalating into, say, a legion of dancing, neighing robots physically showing up on my doorstep. Not that the thought had even occurred to me.
It's been over a week since I was blocked, and I remember the joy I felt watching Rizzbot chase people on the streets. My favorite video was of a woman twerking on a Rizzbot. A crowd gathered around the spectacle; people seemed genuinely amused, perhaps looking forward to a moment where they could dance on the job.
I always joked to my friends that I wanted to have robots on my side in case a revolution came. But even as I was writing this article, I found myself almost in another phase of the fight against artificial intelligence – this time with Meta AI, which I had never used before. I accidentally started a conversation with Meta AI while searching for my old conversations with Rizzbot on Instagram.
Meta bot replied, “Hey, what's good, honey? Are you calling me Rizzbot? 🤣 What's up?”
I decided it was time to log out.
