Why a robot dog with Elon Musk's face is wandering around San Francisco

With the amount of AI content on social media these days, you would be forgiven for doubting the veracity of videos showing a tan-coloured robot dog wearing Elon Musk's expressionless face wandering around San Francisco like some creepy cyber evolution of The Thing. But the robo Musks actually exist, and other tech billionaires have received the same treatment, all in the name of art.

The robots aren't part of Tesla's Optimus project. They were created by Beeple, AKA Mike Winkelmann, the digital artist who became a household name in 2021 when he sold an NFT for $69.3 million and who more recently turned the best JD Vance memes into art.

The Musk robot dog went on walkies in San Francisco to promote INFINITE_LOOP, a survey of Beeple's work taking place at NODE in Palo Alto. Alongside robots based on Meta head Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the artists Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol (and Winkelmann himself), the dead-eyed pooch was created for a project called Regular Animals, which was displayed in a dog pen at Art Basel Miami last year.

The hyper-realistic masks are the work of mask maker Landon Meier, AKA Hyperflesh, and fitted to the bodies of Unitree Go2 robot dogs. The dogs have cameras, which capture images of their environment. This data is then used to generate and print AI art in different styles when the dogs are in 'Poop Mode'.

The Warhol robot poops out vibrant pop art, Picasso defecates cubist designs while Zuckerberg’s poop has a metaverse aesthetic, and Musk’s has a stark black and white loo inspired by his oh-so 'edgy' X branding.

As Beeple explains in the post above, the robot dogs are intended as a commentary on how we increasingly see the world not through the work of artists but through the lens of tech billionaires. He doesn't intend to suggest that the tech bros are artists like Picasso and Warhol. Rather, he seeks to critique and satirise the status that society gives them while highlighting how algorithms now shape art, politics and even our sense of reality.

According to NODE, “Regular Animals reinterprets the legacy of pop portraiture, sculpture, and generative art through the lens of technology. Each robotic humanoid is not a static object but a fluid digital canvas”.

Editions of the robots sold out at $100,000 a piece at Art Basel last year. Each one lives for three years, or 21 dog years. During that time, all interactions and memories are stored via blockchain, allowing the artwork to outlive its physical form in the digital realm.

Image 1 of 2

INFINITE_LOOP will be at NODE until 30 June. Regular Animals will also be at Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin from 28 April to 10 May.