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📂 Category: Media & Entertainment,Apps,Robotics,robots,TikTok,humanoids,social
📌 Main takeaway:
A few days ago, I woke up at around 4:30 AM to an amazing Instagram DM.
Rizzbot, a hugely popular bot with more than a million followers on TikTok and more than half a million followers on Instagram, sent me a photo: It was flipping me.
There are no words. There is no explanation. Just a robot raising its middle finger.
Although I felt shocked, the sinking feeling meant I could guess why. A few weeks ago, Rizzbot — or the person running the account — and I talked about a potential story. I found the story interesting: A human being walks the streets of Austin wearing Nike clothes and a cowboy hat. He’s known for roasting, but he’s also flirty and having a good time. The name Rizz comes from the Gen Z slang word rizz For charisma.
I was amazed by the increasing popularity of the account. People are usually uncomfortable with humans. There are privacy concerns and fears of job displacement. Online, people hurl insults at them, most notably calling them a “clinker.” At the same time, in the world of robotics, experts are discussing what it is best suited to do.
I saw Rizzbot as a role model in making people feel comfortable interacting with a human.
Resbot agreed to do an interview, so I began reaching out to experts to discuss the future of human beings in preparation for a story. Two weeks after my first direct message with Rizzbot, I told her that I would finally send her some interview questions the following Monday or Tuesday.
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But life happened, and I missed my deadline. I was finally ready to submit questions first thing on Thursday morning, and I thought, no big deal.
It’s too late. In the early hours of that night, Rezbot sent that photo. The message is clear: I broke your word, so do it.
I didn’t give up. I apologized to the robot (or human?) for the delay and promised that I would send the questions first thing during business hours. But when I tried a few hours later, I encountered a “User not found” message.
The robot blocked me.
Have you turned on the fail-safe system?
My friends thought it was funny that I was suspended and blocked by Rizzbot, because for weeks, all I talked about was how excited I was to write this story.
“LOL Rizzbot roasted you,” a friend texted me.
Another said: “You’re dealing with a robot LOLOLOL.” She reached out to Rizzbot on TikTok, a move a friend described as desperate. But what can I do? I pitched the story to my editor, spent hours researching, and despite this issue, Rizzbot will still be interesting to tech-loving TechCrunch readers.
While my friends were laughing, I fell into a state of depression. Not only was my story dead, but I was also the girl who got blocked by a dancing robot.
My colleague Amanda Silberling offered to help me. I reached out to the Rizzbot account to ask why I was banned. Rizzbot gave a succinct response: “Rizzbot blocks like it swings — smoothly, confidently, and without any remorse.” Then I sent her the same middle finger picture that she sent me. I thought, “Wow, I wasn’t special enough to make a unique jump.”
But then, a friend offered a terrifying idea that I hadn’t even considered. “It wasn’t a human response. I’m afraid for you.” It seems I’ve already made my first robot enemy, and the AI revolution is just beginning.
Or did you? Was I really arguing with a human?
She finds out that Rizzbot’s name is actually Jake the Robot.
According to reports, its owner is an anonymous YouTuber and biochemist. The robot itself is a standard Unitree G1 model, and anyone can buy one for $16,000 to over $70,000.
Rizzbot was trained by Kyle Morgenstein, a doctoral student in the Robotics Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. He worked alongside 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 remote control, with its real owner, apparently not Morgenstein, at the helm.
If I had to guess how the technology behind the bot works — after speaking with Malte F. Jung, an associate professor at Cornell University who has studied information science — someone triggers the bot’s behaviors, a photo of who is interacting with the bot is taken, it runs through ChatGPT or some other master, and the text-to-speech function is then used to flirt with or flirt with the person.
“The bot flips the script on people abusing bots,” Young told me. “Now robots can exploit people. The product here is performance.”
Morgenstein told other media outlets that Rizzbot’s actual owner just loves to entertain people, and loves to show the happiness that humans can bring.
It’s not clear who manages Rizzbot’s social accounts, though when Rizzbot sent that photo to Silberling, it also sent an error message — perhaps by accident — about the GPU running out of memory. The message indicated that an AI agent may be involved in running this account and may be automatically generating DM responses. He also noted that the Rizzbot only has 48GB of memory.
“What makes you so sure it was a person at all?” My programmer friend asked me about an Instagram account manager.
In the age of AI, someone who is able to train a bot will likely be able to connect LLM to Instagram direct messages. My programmer friend said my ban was fail-safe, which meant I automated it myself via DM in the early hours — even if it was a reply.
But there are some signs that a human is involved in Rizzbot’s social media management: There were typos in my initial direct message response when I first requested an interview.
However, unless Rizzbot tells me whether its social media manager is another bot (which seems unlikely given our beef), I’ll likely never know. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
“If they get $50,000 for a robot and $20,000 for a 48GB memory device, I’m not going to give them anything,” my programmer friend noted. “They’re clearly committed to this thing.”
The robot’s brain is still rotting
Rizzbot’s TikTok page alone has more than 45 million views. One video shows Risbot chasing people through the streets, while another shows him crashing into a pole and falling in the middle of the street. A viral video, supposedly edited by AI, shows a Rizzbot being run over by a car.
“It looks frankly funny,” one founder friend told me, describing the viral videos as “robot brain rot.” The AI is primitive, he said, but the bot’s premise is a “funny mix” of silly Internet humor – or absurdity – and a lightness that’s missing from a lot of social media these days. “He interacts with people in a new way.”
However, my Rizzbot rabbit hole still makes me think about the role of human beings in our society. Every sci-fi movie I’ve ever watched – from “Blade Runner” to “I, Robot” has immersed me. How afraid am I now that I’ve made my first human enemy?
“Performance seems to be a really big use case for these types of robots,” Lee Young said, adding that Rezbot was “like a modern version of street performance with a hand puppet.”
“A lot of times, hand puppets are tacky,” he continued.
Aside from Rezbot, he mentioned a Spring Festival parade in China, where robots performed folk dances alongside humans, and in San Francisco, meanwhile, people are heading to the boxing ring to watch robots trade punches.
“Robots will become the main market artists, presenters, dancers, singers, comedians and companions,” Dima Gazda, founder of robotics company Esper Bionics, told me, adding that humans will become those with specialized talents. “As robots gain agility and emotional intelligence, they will integrate into interactive displays and experiences better than humans.”
Fortunately, for now, it seems difficult to scale up dancing robots en masse, according to Gene Apicella, executive director at the Pittsburgh Robotics Network. So I don’t have to worry about this beef escalating into, say, a horde of sexy, dancing robots physically showing up on my doorstep. Not that such an idea had ever crossed my mind.
It’s been over a week since I was banned, and I find myself remembering the joy I found watching Rezbot chase people down the streets. My favorite video showed a woman dancing on a Rizzbot. A crowd formed around the scene. People seemed genuinely enjoying themselves, and perhaps eager for their own moment to play with the robot.
I always joked with my friends that I wanted to keep robots by my side in case there was a revolution. But even as I write this article, I almost find myself in the meat of another AI — this time with Meta AI, which I’ve never used before. I accidentally started a conversation with Meta AI while searching for my old conversations with Rizzbot on Instagram.
Metabot replied: “Oh my god, what a good family? Are you calling me Rizzbot? 🤣 What’s a poppin’?”
I decided it was time to log out.
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