I woke up to a DM from a robot that was flipping me off. It was Rizzbot, the kid-sized humanoid who parades around Austin in dunks and a cowboy hat, a viral TikTok sensation with at least a million followers and an uncanny ability to roast strangers. I had missed a promised window to send some interview questions. Rizzbot responded with an image of a raised middle finger, and blocked me directly afterward. Message received.
The stunt was amusing, petty and absolutely telling. It was a snapshot of this weird cultural moment where humanoids are being turned into social media characters, AI agents run the back office and the line between performance art and personhood blurs in the DMs.
How A Humanoid Turned Into A Social Media Roastmaster
Rizzbot’s ascent is an extreme case study in how to make a machine friendly. Its name takes inspiration from “rizz,” Gen Z shorthand for charisma, and the content is a mixture of flirting, roasting and slapstick. The robot’s TikTok page has more than 45 million views, with videos of street chases, pratfalls into poles and a viral (likely AI-altered) bit where it is “run over” by a car. It’s absurdist theater engineered for the For You page.
That popularity is counterintuitive. Polls consistently indicate that people are uncomfortable around humanoid robots, citing concerns over privacy and jobs. Online, you’ll find slurs like “clankers.” But a snarky robot in a cowboy hat appears to break down defenses. It’s the oldest trick in show business: Comedy disarms.
Behind The Gesture The Tech And The Tactics
Beneath the hat, Rizzbot is a Unitree G1, a commercially available humanoid created in China. Depending on setup, G1 models range from just under $16,000 to more than $70,000. Rizzbot’s owner is rumored to be an anonymous YouTuber acquainted with biochemistry. Movement training came courtesy of one Kyle Morgenstein, a UT Austin PhD student who helped choreograph dances and limb articulation; the bot’s stagecraft combines preprogrammed routines with live remote control.
It’s in the DMs where things get interesting. When a fellow colleague messaged the account to ask why I’d been blocked, Rizzbot replied with swagger and the same middle-finger photo — and then seemed to surface a stray system error about being out of GPU memory, revealing an AI agent in the loop and setting it up as running on around 48 GB of VRAM. That implies a familiar stack: camera capture, large language model to produce the roasts or flirts and then text-to-speech output for the voice. Typos in past messages, though, suggest a human in the mix.
This is exactly the point, say researchers who study human-robot interaction. Performance robots take the script and flip it: Instead of receiving abuse, these machines dispense that abuse. The product is no longer the hardware; it’s the spectacle and audience response.
Could my block have been AI? Absolutely. An AI agent can also be programmed to regard late, or non-business-hour, DMs as low-trust and auto-responses block-worthy. But it might just as easily have been a performer playing along. Either way, the act of setting a boundary felt intentional — and on-brand.
Performance Bots Are Having a Moment on Stage
Rizzbot isn’t an outlier; it’s a bellwether. From Spring Festival productions in China that pair humanoids with human dancers to robot boxing shows in San Francisco, machines are making the leap from factory floors to stages and sidewalks. We’re looking at robots as the world’s next mainstream entertainers — with humans relegated to niche headliners.
— Dima Gazda, Esper Bionics
More Factory Floor Hits: On Panhandling Robots; “sfai.zip” by Brian Firenzi for ESPNOnline; robotxrobot.com/sfai.zip; Songs in a Minor Key; The New Sound of Music by Alec Hanley Bemis.
“If you heard a Cat Power album and didn’t know who Cat Power was, would you say: ‘Wow, she’s done something radical and different?’ And the answer is yes.”
But achieving this task at scale is a challenge. As the Pittsburgh Robotics Network has observed, synchronized, safe public choreography across numerous robots is difficult. Battery life, stability, weather concerns and the unpredictability of crowds present limitations. For now, the sweet spot seems to be the street-performance model: one bot, one crew, way too many phones.
Why a Robot’s Middle Finger on TikTok Matters
A petty DM from a robot is hard to take seriously. It’s more difficult to ignore what it represents for the future of social platforms. AI agents are now capable enough to operate creator inboxes, triage requests and preserve persona continuity. Which opens up new questions about disclosure, consent and moderation — particularly when the “character” is mundanely programmed to roast strangers for clicks.
There’s also the parasocial twist. When you get blocked by a robot, it still smarts like a person, even if the “self” is an accordion of scripts and batteries and showmanship! And that’s exactly why it works. In a media landscape where more than 1 billion people use TikTok worldwide and young audiences log an exorbitant amount of time per session, the most valuable asset is not raw intelligence — its presence. Rizzbot has it in spades.
As for me, I apologized to the bot and its human — whoever that was listening. No response. If the aim was to keep me on my toes, job done. The roast came home, the bit lived on and a humanoid secured itself another headline — middle finger and all.
