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A few Thursdays ago, I woke up at about 4:30 a.m. to a dizzying Instagram DM.
Ridgebot, a popular humanoid robot, is more than that 1 million TikTok followers And more than that Half a million followers On Instagram, sent me a picture: she was flipping me.
There are no words. There is no explanation. Just a robot with a raised middle finger.
Although I was shocked, a sinking feeling meant I could guess why. A few weeks ago, Rizzbot — or the person who runs the account — and I chatted about a potential 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 for flirting and having a good time. The name Ridge comes from a Gen Z slang word rizz For charisma.
I was intrigued by the growing popularity of the account. Humans are generally uncomfortable with humanoids. There are privacy concerns and fear of job displacement. Online, people hurled abuse at them, specifically calling them “clunkers”. In the world of robotics, meanwhile, experts are debating what they would be best suited to do.
I saw Ridgebot as a role model for people to feel comfortable interacting with humanoids.
Ridgebot agreed to an interview, so I began reaching out to experts to discuss the future of humanoids in preparation for a story. Two weeks after my initial DM with Ridgebot, I said I would finally send it 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 send the question first thing on Thursday, and I thought, no big deal.
It’s too late. That night, Ridgebot sent that photo. The message is clear: you have broken your word, so stop.
I didn’t give up. I apologized to the robot (or human?) for the delay and promised that I would send the question first during office hours. But when I tried a few hours later, I was met with “User not found”.
The robot blocked me.
Do I have a fail-safe trigger?
My friends thought it was hilarious that I got flipped and blocked by Ridgebot, because for weeks, that’s how excited I was to do this story.
“LOL Rizzbot roasted you,” a friend texted me.
“You’re beefing with a robot lolol,” said another I reached out to Rizzbot on TikTok, a move a friend called desperate. But what else can I do? I pitched the story to my editor, did hours of research, and — despite this beef — Rizzbot would still be interesting to TechCrunch’s tech-savvy readers.
While my friends were laughing, I entered into a state of depression. Not only was my story dead, but I was now the girl who got blocked by a dancing robot.
my Colleague Amanda Silberling offered to help me. He reached out to the Risebot account to find out why I was blocked. Ridgebot gave a solid response: “Ridgebot blocks like he ridges — smooth, confident and with zero regrets.” It then sent him the same middle finger picture it sent me. I thought, “Wow, I wasn’t special enough for one.” Unique flip off.“
But then, a friend suggested a terrifying thought that I hadn’t even considered. “It wasn’t a human reaction. I’m afraid for you.” It feels like I’ve already created my first robot enemy, and the AI revolution has just begun.
Or did I? Was I really beefing with a man?
I found out that Ridgebot’s name is actually Jack the Robot.
Its owner is an anonymous YouTuber and biochemist, According to reports. The robot itself a Standard Unitree G1 modelAnd anyone can buy one From $16,000 to over $70,000.
Ridgebot was Trained by Kyle Morgensteinis a PhD student in the Robotics Laboratory at UT Austin. He worked with a team for about three weeks, teaching the robot how to dance and move its limbs. Although most of the robot’s behavior is pre-programmed, it is operated by a remote control, whose real owner, apparently not Morgenstein, directs it nearby.
If I had to guess how the technology behind the robot works — Cornell University associate professor Malte F. After talking with Jung, who studied information science — someone triggers the robot’s behavior, and a picture of someone interacting with the robot is taken, run through ChatGPT or another LLM, and used to text-to-speech a person.
“The robot flips the script of people abusing the robot,” Jung told me. “Now robots can abuse people. The product here is performance.”
Morgenstein told other outlets that Ridgebot’s real owner just likes to entertain people, showing the joy that humanoids are capable of bringing.
It’s unclear who runs the Ridgebot social accounts, though when Ridgebot sent that photo to Silberlink, it also sent an error message — possibly an accident — about the GPU running out of memory. The message indicates that an AI agent is likely involved in running that account and is likely automatically generating DM responses. It also indicates that the Rizzbot only has 48GB of memory.
“What makes you confident that it was ever a person?” My coder friend asked me about Instagram Account Manager.
In the age of AI, someone capable of training robots is probably able to get an LLM in Instagram DMs. My block could even have been a fail-safe, my coder friend said, meaning I triggered it by DM’ing myself in the first place – even if it was a reply.
But there are clues that a man is involved in running Ridgebot’s social media: his initial DM reply was typed when I first asked for an interview.
Still, until Ridgebot tells me his social media manager is another bot (which seems unlikely to give us a beef), 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 memory machine, I wouldn’t put anything past them,” noted my coder friend. “They are clearly committed.”
It’s still robot brain rot
Rizzbot’s TikTok page alone has received over 45 million views. One video shows Ridgebot chasing people down the street, while another shows it running into a pole and falling in the middle of the road. A viral video, possibly modified by AI, shows Ridgebot running over a car.
“It looks ridiculous, honestly,” a founding friend told me, calling the viral videos “robot brain rot.” He said the AI is rudimentary, but the basis of the robot is a “funny mix” of internet dank – or absurd – humor and much of social media is missing these days. “It communicates with people in a novel way.”
My Ridgebot rabbit hole still got me thinking, though, about the role of humanoids in our society. Every sci-fi movie I’ve ever seen – from “Blade Runner” to “I, Robot” came back to me. How scared should I be now that I’ve made my first human enemy?
“Performance seems to be a really big use case for these kinds of robots,” Jung told me, adding that Ridgebot is “like a modern version of street performance with hand puppets.”
“Often, hand puppets are flashy,” he continued.
In addition to Rizbot, he mentions Spring Festival performances in China, where humanoids Perform folk dances along with peopleAnd in San Francisco, meanwhile, People head to the boxing ring To see the robot exchange jab.
“Robots will become the primary mass-market entertainers, event performers, dancers, singers, comedians and companions,” Dima Gazda, founder of robotics company Esper Bionics, told me, adding that humans will become niche, top talent. “As robots gain grace and emotional intelligence, they will blend in with better performance and interactive experiences than humans.”
Fortunately, at the moment, it seems difficult to scale dancing robots on a large scale, according to Jane Apicella, executive director of the Pittsburgh Robotics Network. So I don’t have to worry about this beef growing over, say, a dance troupe, rising robots physically appearing on my doorstep. Not that the thought didn’t cross my mind.
It’s been over a week now since I was blocked, and I find myself reminiscing about the joy I got from watching Ridgebot chase me down the street. My favorite video features a woman touring a Ridgebot. A crowd forms around the audience; People seemed genuinely amused, itching, perhaps, for their own moment to roam a robot.
I always joked with my friends that I wanted to have robots by my side when the revolution came. But even as I wrote this article, I almost found myself in another AI beef — this time with Meta AI, which I’d never used before. I accidentally started a conversation with Meta AI while looking for my old conversations with Ridgebot on Instagram.
Mater Bot replied, “Yeah, what’s up fam? You calling me Rizbot? 🤣 What’s poppin?”
I decided it was time to log off.
