A couple of Thursdays ago, I awoke at nearly 4:30 a.m. to a dizzying Instagram DM. Rizzbot, a popular humanoid robot with more than 1 million TikTok followers and more than half a million followers on Instagram, had sent me a photo: he was flipping me off. No words. No explanation. Just a robot with its middle finger raised.
Although I was shocked, a sinking feeling meant that I could guess why. A few weeks ago, Rizzbot and I chatted about a possible story. I found the account interesting: a humanoid walking the streets of Austin wearing Nike dunks and a cowboy hat. It is known for roasting, but also flirting and having a good time. The name Rizz comes from the Gen Z slang word for charisma.
I was intrigued by the rising popularity of the account. People are usually uncomfortable with humanoids. There are privacy concerns and job displacement fears. Online, people sling slurs at them, most notably calling them clankers. In the robotics world, 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 started 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 it I would finally send it some interview questions on the following Monday or Tuesday.
But life happened, and I missed my own deadline. I was finally prepared to send the questions first thing Thursday a.m., and I thought it was no big deal. It was too late. In the wee hours that night, Rizzbot sent that photo. The message was clear: You broke your word, so eff off.
I did not give up. I apologized to the robot for the delay and promised I would send the questions first thing during office hours. But when I tried a few hours later, I was met with user not found. The robot had blocked me.
My friends thought it was hilarious that I was flipped off and blocked by Rizzbot, since for weeks, all I spoke about was how excited I was to do this story. One friend texted me that Rizzbot had roasted me. Another said I was beefing with a robot. I reached out to Rizzbot on TikTok, a move one 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 interesting to tech-loving readers.
While my friends were laughing, I entered a state of gloom. Not only was my story dead, but I was also now the girl who got blocked by a dancing robot.
My colleague offered to help me. She reached out to the Rizzbot account to ask why I was blocked. Rizzbot gave a curt response, saying it blocks like it rizzes, smooth, confident, and with zero remorse. It then sent her the same middle finger photo it sent me. I thought I was not even special enough for a unique flip off.
But then, one friend offered a terrifying thought I had not even considered. They said it was not a human response and that they were scared for me. It seemed I had already made my first robot enemy, and the AI revolution has only just begun.
Or did I? Was I really beefing 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 Unitree G1 Model, and anyone can buy one for sixteen thousand to over seventy thousand dollars.
Rizzbot was trained by Kyle Morgenstein, a PhD student at a robotic laboratory. He worked alongside a team for around three weeks, teaching the robot how to dance and move limbs. While much of the robot’s behavior is pre-programmed, it is operated by a remote control, with its true owner, apparently not Morgenstein, nearby commanding it.
If I had to guess how the tech behind the robot works, after talking with an associate professor who studied information sciences, someone triggers the robot’s behaviors, and a picture is taken of whoever is interacting with the robot, run through an AI model, and a text-to-speech function is then used to roast or flirt with the person. The professor told me that the robot turns the script around of people abusing robots. Now the robot gets to abuse people. The product here is the performance.
Morgenstein told other outlets that the actual owner of Rizzbot just likes to entertain people and show the joy that humanoids are capable of bringing. It is unclear who runs the Rizzbot social accounts, though when Rizzbot sent that photo to my colleague, it also sent an error message about being out of GPU memory. The message indicated that an AI agent is probably involved in running that account and is maybe auto-generating DM responses. It also indicated that Rizzbot only has 48GB of memory.
My coder friend asked me what made me confident it was ever a person running the Instagram account. In the age of AI, someone capable of training a robot is likely capable of connecting an AI model to Instagram DMs. My block could even have been a fail-safe, my coder friend said, meaning I automatically triggered it myself by messaging in the early hours. But there are some clues that a human is involved, such as typos in its initial DM reply to me when I first asked for an interview.
Still, unless Rizzbot tells me if his social media manager is another bot, which seems unlikely given our beef, I will likely never know. Maybe it does not matter. My coder friend pointed out that if they got the money for the bot and the memory machine, they are clearly committed to the bit.
Rizzbot’s TikTok page alone has racked up more than 45 million views. One video shows Rizzbot chasing people in the streets, while another sees it running into a pole and falling in the middle of the street. A viral video, presumably altered by AI, shows Rizzbot being run over by a car.
One founder friend told me it seems hilarious, calling the viral videos robot brain rot. He said the AI is rudimentary, but the robot’s premise is a funny intermingling of internet dank humor and the lightheartedness that much of social media is missing these days. It interacts with people in a novel way.
My Rizzbot rabbit hole still had me thinking about the role of humanoids in our society. Every sci-fi movie I have ever watched came flooding back to me. How scared should I be now that I have made my first humanoid enemy?
The professor told me that performance seems to be really the big use case for these kinds of robots, adding that Rizzbot was like a modern version of street performance with a hand puppet. He continued that hand puppets are often snarky. Aside from Rizzbot, he mentioned a performance in China where humanoids performed folk dance alongside humans, and in San Francisco, people head to the boxing ring to watch robots exchange jabs.
The founder of a robotics company told me that robots will become the primary mass market entertainers, show performers, dancers, singers, comedians, and companions, adding that humans will become niche, top talent. As robots gain grace and emotional intelligence, they will blend into performances and interactive experiences better than humans.
Luckily, right now, dancing robots seem hard to scale en masse, according to an executive director at a robotics network. So I do not have to worry about this beef escalating to a legion of dancing, rizzing robots physically showing up at my doorstep. Not that such a thought crossed my mind.
It is now been over a week since I was blocked, and I find myself reminiscing on the joy I found watching Rizzbot chase people in the streets. My favorite video showed a woman twerking on Rizzbot. A crowd formed around the spectacle; people seemed genuinely entertained, itching for their own moment to twerk on a robot.
I always joked to my friends that I wanted to keep robots on my side in case the revolution came. But even as I wrote this article, I found myself almost in another AI beef, this time with a different AI, which I had never used before. I accidentally started a conversation with it while looking for my old conversations with Rizzbot on Instagram. The bot replied asking if I was calling it Rizzbot and asked what was happening. I decided it was time to log off.