IShowSpeed
Jake the Rizzbot was permanently scarred after IShowSpeed’s attack. The company that created it demands a million dollars.
Company demands one million dollars North American streamer Darren Jason Watkins Jr., better known as IShowSpeedis being sued for allegedly attacking and permanently damaging a humanoid robot famous on social media under the name “Jake the Rizzbot”.
The lawsuit was filed by Social Robotics, a company associated with the development of the robot project, and asks one million dollars (around 900 thousand euros) in financial compensation.
According to the complaint, cited by , the incident occurred after Speed — voted streamer of the year for the second time in a row a few days ago — became angry and agitated during an interaction with the robot, ending up “intentionally attacking” it.
Images circulating online show the streamer in a verbal argument with the robot, before hitting it with a punch, putting it in a kind of chokehold and, finally, pushing it onto a sofa. “You think I’m joking, bro?” Speed shouts in the video.
The moment happened live, on a livestream. The case takes on even more unusual contours precisely for this reason, which, according to Social Robotics lawyer Joel Levine, reduces the scope for disputes about what happened. “There is no major discrepancy regarding the facts,” Levine told , arguing that the objective is to ensure “accountability”.
YouTuber and streamer IShowSpeed, as his artistic name clearly shows, is already well known to the public for presenting hyperactive, energetic and exaggerated behavior with constant simulations of barking and mortals that appealed to younger people.
He has become one of the most popular figures on the Internet, with tens of millions of subscribers to his YouTube channel and hundreds of millions of views accumulated throughout his career. It started on YouTube in 2016 with videos related to video games like NBA 2K and gradually migrated to live broadcasts of games like FIFA, Fortnite and “IRL” (in real life) content, where you interact directly with the public while traveling or participating in everyday activities.
But it was the expression “sewey” or “suey”, a faulty imitation of the famous cry “!” by Cristiano Ronaldo, who brought Speed into the spotlight: it became a kind of meme within the streamer’s online community.
Over the last few years, the North American streamer has published several contents in which he appears to celebrate the gesture and increasingly display fanatical admiration for the Portuguese star. He even got to know him:
The robot in question went viral at the beginning of the year, when it appeared in Austin, Texas, as a small bipedal humanoid measuring around 1.2 meters, with a cowboy hat, chain necklace and a vocabulary marked by alpha generation slang.
A few weeks later, the same robot appeared in California, on the streets of West Hollywood, dressed in the colors of the rainbow, in a public performance that some interpreted as an admission of homosexuality.
According to the lawsuit, the damage was so extensive that the robot was destroyed. The complaint further states that the incident caused indirect losses, including the cancellation of media opportunities, such as a co-presentation with Jimmy Donaldson, better known as , the biggest YouTuber of all time, as well as an appearance on the CBS NFL Today program.
TechCrunch also mentions the existence of a police report from the Austin police, where an officer called to the scene recorded that the robot was damaged without the “implied consent” of the owner. Meanwhile, Rizzbot himself told the same outlet that he needed “a completely new body”: all that was left were the Nike sneakers and the cowboy hat.
