A few Thursdays ago, I woke up at nearly 4:30 a.m. to an Instagram DM that kept me awake.
Rizzbot, a child-sized humanoid robot developed by Unitree Robotics with a large following on social media (more than 1 million followers on TikTok and more than 500,000 followers on Instagram), sent me a photo. He was flipping me off.
There are no words. No explanation. It’s just a robot holding up its middle finger.
I was shocked, but my sinking feeling meant I could guess why. A few weeks ago, Rizzbot — or whoever runs the Instagram account — and I were discussing a possible story. I found the account interesting. A humanoid walking around the streets of Austin wearing Nike dunks and a cowboy hat. In addition to roasting, they are also known for flirting and having a good time. The name Rizz comes from the Gen Z slang word rizz, which means charisma.
I was intrigued by the growing popularity of this account. People are generally uncomfortable with humanoids. There are also privacy concerns and the risk of losing your job. Online, people hurl slurs at them, specifically calling them “clunkers.” Meanwhile, in the world of robotics, experts are debating what robots are best able to do.
I saw Rizzbot as a role model for helping people feel comfortable interacting with humanoids.
Lizbot agreed to be interviewed, and I began reaching out to experts to discuss the future of humanoids in preparation for my article. Two weeks after sending Rizzbot my first DM, I finally told him I would send him some interview questions the following Monday or Tuesday.
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But life happens and I missed my deadline. I finally got ready to send the question first thing Thursday morning, so I thought it was no big deal.
too late. Rizzbot sent the photo early Wednesday night. A clear message: You broke your promise, so please stop.
I didn’t give up. I apologized to the robot (or was it human?) for the delay and promised to be the first to send in my question during business hours. But when I tried it a few hours later, I got a “user not found” message.
A robot was blocking me.
Was the failsafe activated?
My friends probably thought it was funny that Lizbot hated me and blocked me. Because all I’ve been saying for weeks is how excited I am to tell this story.
“LOL, Lizbot roasted you,” one of my friends texted me.
“You’re fighting a robot lol,” said another. I reached out to Rizzbot on TikTok, which one friend called hopeless. But what else can you do? I pitched this story to an editor and spent hours researching it. And despite all this, Rizzbot will still be of interest to TechCrunch’s tech-loving readers.
While my friends laughed, I felt depressed. Not only was my story over, but I was also a girl stopped by a dancing robot.
My colleague Amanda Silberling offered to help me. She contacted the Rizzbot account and asked why I was blocked. Lisbot gave a curt reply. “Lizbot blocks like Liz: smooth, confident, and totally without scruples.” And then I sent her the same middle finger photo that I had sent to her. This is what I thought. “Wow, I wasn’t special enough to do a unique flip.”
But then a friend suggested a scary idea that I had never thought of. “That wasn’t a human reaction. I’m worried about you.” It seems like I’ve already made my first robot adversary, but the AI revolution is only just beginning.
Or was I? Was I really fighting with a human?
It turns out Rizzbot’s name is actually Jake the Robot.
The owner is reportedly an anonymous YouTuber and biochemist. The robot itself is a standard Unitree G1 model, manufactured in Hangzhou, China, and available to anyone for anywhere from $16,000 to more than $70,000.
Rizzbot was trained by Kyle Morgenstein, a doctoral student in UT Austin’s Robotics Lab. He worked with the team for about three weeks, teaching the robot how to dance and move its limbs. Although many of the robot’s movements are preprogrammed, it is controlled by a remote control and commanded nearby by its true owner, who is clearly not Morgenstein.
If I had to guess how the technology behind the robot would work, after speaking with Marthe F. Jung, an associate professor of information science at Cornell University, it would be that someone triggers the robot’s movements, a photo of the person interacting with the robot is taken, run through ChatGPT or some other LLM, and a text-to-speech function is used to converse or flirt with that person.
“Robots flip the script of people mistreating robots,” Jung told me. “Now robots can abuse humans. The product here is performance.”
Morgenstein told other media that Lisbot’s actual owner simply likes to entertain people and show the joy that humanoids can bring.
It’s unclear who runs the Rizzbot social account, but when Rizzbot sent the photo to Silberling, it also sent an error message about running out of GPU memory (possibly an accident). This message indicates that an AI agent is likely responsible for running the account and may be auto-generating the DM response. It also showed that Rizzbot only has 48 GB of memory.
“How can you be so sure it was a human?” a programmer friend of mine asked me about my Instagram account manager.
In the age of AI, anyone who can train a robot could potentially connect LLM to Instagram DMs. My programmer friend told me that my block may have been a failsafe, meaning that even though it was a reply, I automatically triggered the block by sending a DM in the early morning hours.
However, there are some clues that point to human involvement in Rizzbot’s social media operations. When I first asked for an interview, there was a typo in the first DM reply to me.
Still, unless Rizzbot tells me if his social media manager is another bot (which seems unlikely given our opinion), I’ll probably never know. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
“Once I get $50,000 for a bot and a few thousand for a machine with 48GB of memory, I won’t spend anything more,” a programmer friend pointed out. “They’re clearly working hard on this part.”
The robot brain is still rotten.
Rizzbot’s TikTok page alone has more than 45 million views. One video shows Lisbot chasing people through the city, and another video shows Lisbot hitting a utility pole and falling into the middle of the road. A viral video, presumably altered by AI, shows Lisbot being run over by a car.
“Honestly, it seems ridiculous,” one of the founder’s friends told me, calling the viral video “robot brain rot.” He said that while the AI is rudimentary, the premise of the robot is a “funny mix” of the dank or absurdist humor of the internet and the levity missing from much of social media these days. “Interact with people in novel ways.”
But Rizzbot’s rabbit hole still made me think about the role of humanoids in society. It instantly reminded me of every sci-fi movie I’ve ever seen, from Blade Runner to I, Robot. Now that you’ve created your first humanoid enemy, how scared should you be?
“Performance seems like a really big use for this kind of robot,” Jung told me, adding that Rizzbot is “kind of a modern day version of street performance with hand puppets.”
“Hand puppets are often offensive,” he continued.
In addition to Lisbot, he also mentioned China’s Spring Festival performance. There, humanoids perform folk dances alongside humans, while in San Francisco people head to a boxing ring and watch robots trade jabs.
“Robots will become major mass-market entertainers, show performers, dancers, singers, comedians, and companions,” Dima Gazda, founder of the robotics company Esper Bionics, told me, adding that humans will be the best in the niche. “As robots gain grace and emotional intelligence, they will be better able to integrate into performances and interactive experiences than humans.”
Fortunately, mass scaling of dancing robots seems difficult at this point, said Jen Apicella, executive director of the Pittsburgh Robotics Network. So I don’t have to worry about this beef escalating to, say, an army of dancing, hyperactive robots physically showing up on my doorstep. That thought never crossed my mind.
It’s been over a week since I’ve been blocked, and I’ve noticed that Rizzbot takes pleasure in watching people chase people around town. My favorite video featured a woman twerking with a Rizzbot. A crowd formed around the scene. People really seem to be having fun and may be itching to play around with the robots.
I always joked to my friends that I wanted to have robots on my side in case there was a revolution. However, even as I was writing this article, I found myself almost obsessed with another AI. This time it was a meta AI that I had never used before. While searching for old conversations with Rizzbot on Instagram, I accidentally started a conversation with Meta AI.
Meta’s bot replied, “Hey, what’s a good fam? You call me Lizbot? 🤣What’s poppin’?”
I decided it was time to log off.
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