A couple of Thursdays ago, I awoke at nearly 4:30 a.m. to a dizzying Instagram DM.
Rizzbot, a kid-size humanoid robot that’s made by Unitree Robotics and has a massive social media following — 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 — or the person who runs its Instagram account — 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’s known for roasting, but also flirting and having a good time. The name Rizz comes from the Gen Z slang word rizz 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.
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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, no big deal.
Too late. In the wee hours of Wednesday night, Rizzbot sent that photo. Message clear: You broke your word, so eff off.
I didn’t give up. I apologized to the robot (or to its human?) 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.
Did I trigger a fail-safe?
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.
“LOL Rizzbot roasted you,” one friend texted me.
“YOU ARE BEEFING WITH A ROBOT LOLOLOL,” another said. 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 TechCrunch’s 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 Amanda Silberling offered to help me. She reached out to the Rizzbot account to ask why I was blocked. Rizzbot gave a curt response: “Rizzbot blocks like he rizzes — smooth, confident, and with zero remorse.” It then sent her the same middle finger photo it sent me. I thought: Wow, I wasn’t even special enough for a unique flip off.
But then, one friend offered a terrifying thought I hadn’t even considered. “It wasn’t a human response. I’m scared for you.” It seems 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 — they’re made in Hangzhou, China — and anyone can buy one for $16,000 to over $70,000.
Rizzbot was trained by Kyle Morgenstein, a PhD student at UT Austin’s robotic laboratory. He worked alongside a team for around three weeks, teaching the robot how to dance and move its limbs. While much of the robot’s behavior is pre-programmed, it’s 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 Malte F. Jung, an associate professor at Cornell University who studied information sciences — someone triggers the robot’s behaviors, and a picture is taken of whoever is interacting with the robot, run through ChatGPT or some other LLM, and a text-to-speech function is then used to roast or flirt with the person.
“The robot turns the script around of people abusing robots,” Jung told me. “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, likes to show the joy that humanoids are capable of bringing.
It’s unclear who runs the Rizzbot social accounts, though when Rizzbot sent that photo to Silberling, it also sent an error message — probably an accident — 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.
“What makes you confident it was ever a person?” my coder friend asked me about the Instagram account manager.
In the age of AI, someone capable of training a robot is likely capable of connecting an LLM to Instagram DMs. My block could even have been a fail-safe, my coder friend said, meaning I automatically triggered it myself by DM’ing in the early hours — even if it was a reply.
But there are some clues that a human is involved in running Rizzbot’s social media: There were 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 doesn’t matter.
“If they got $50,000 for a bot and a couple thousand for a 48GB memory machine, I wouldn’t put anything past ‘em,” my coder friend pointed out. “They’re clearly committed to the bit.”
It’s still robot brain rot
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.
“It seems hilarious, honestly,” one founder friend told me, 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 — or absurdist — 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, though, about the role of humanoids in our society. Every sci-fi movie I’ve ever watched — from “Blade Runner” to “I, Robot” came flooding back to me. 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 Rizzbot was “like a modern version of street performance with a hand puppet.”
“Often, hand puppets are snarky,” he continued.
Aside from Rizzbot, he mentioned the Spring Festival performance in China, where humanoids performed folk dance alongside humans, and in San Francisco, meanwhile, people head to the boxing ring to watch robots exchange jabs.
“Robots will become the primary mass market entertainers, show performers, dancers, singers, comedians, and companions,” Dima Gazda, the founder of the robotics company Esper Bionics, told me, adding that humans will become niche, top talent. “As robots gain grace and emotional intelligence, they’ll blend into performances and interactive experiences better than humans.”
Luckily, right now, dancing robots seem hard to scale en masse, according to Jen Apicella, executive director at the Pittsburgh Robotics Network. So I don’t have to worry about this beef escalating to, say, a legion of dancing, rizzing robots physically showing up at my doorstep. Not that such a thought crossed my mind.
It’s 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, perhaps, 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 Meta AI, which I had never used before. I accidentally started a conversation with Meta AI while looking for my old conversations with Rizzbot on Instagram.
Meta’s bot replied, “Yoo, what’s good fam? You callin’ me Rizzbot? 🤣 What’s poppin’?”
I decided it was time to log off.
