Police in Cologne, Germany, have seized a humanoid robot after a pair of livestreamers used it to sexually harass a teenage girl.
According to a police statement released Monday, the robot “allegedly touched a 16-year-old girl on the buttocks and performed thrusting motions against” her.
There’s not much “alleged” about the incident, though, since the IRL streamers recorded everything that happened while live on Twitch.
The robot’s owner is 16-year-old German IRL streamer Agaamuza. For the past few weeks, according to 404 Media, he’s been filming himself and his friends wandering the streets of Cologne while accompanied by a humanoid robot from the company Unitree, which they dress in a ridiculous outfit and have fixed with a mustache. They spend a lot of the time using the robot, which they’ve nicknamed Ahmed, to bother and outright harass strangers, most of them women.
In clips of the recent incident circulating online, the robot encounters a group of girls standing on the street at night. Then, it just so happens that the robot, after having no problems walking down a busy sidewalk, plows directly into one of the girl’s behind.
“Oh my god stop,” one of her friends says.
Agaamuza and his crew act as if they’re shocked by the robot’s actions, but ask the girls if they want to meet the robot. When she and her friends say no, the robot starts thrusting its hips provocatively in front of them. The girls, repulsed, move away.
This is just one example, though. In plenty of other videos, Agaamuza tricks unsuspecting women into being friendly with the robot before it suddenly springs into doing something pervy, like humping a woman as she’s hugging it, or making masturbatory gestures. Then Agaamuza’s posse play dumb and pretend to be appalled by what’s happening.
Make no mistake: these robots aren’t autonomous and everything they do is controlled by a human operator. Those hip thrusts and other gross gestures are pre-programmed moves, not something that’s happening spontaneously.
Nonetheless, the German police statement added an unnecessary air of mystery to who was responsible for these actions, saying that it’s now “investigating how the robot was operating at the time of the incident and whether someone was deliberately controlling its movements.”
This is unfortunately another example of how men looking for clout are using the latest gadgets to target women. Plenty of other livestreamers and Instagram “pick up artists” are using Meta smart glasses to film themselves harassing girls on the street and record them without their consent.
More on robots: Walmart Running Into Trouble as Its Super-Expensive Robots Can’t Handle the Realities of Warehouse Work
The post Livestreamers Film Themselves Using Humanoid Robot to Sexually Assault Teen Girl, Prompting Police to Seize the Bot appeared first on Futurism.
