This Robot moves like Jagger.
In honor of the 40th anniversary of the rock group’s album “Tattoo You,” US robotics company Boston Dynamics decided to teach four of its internet-famous dancing Spot robots to mimic the band’s moves in the music video for “Start Me Up.”
While the robots’ dance moves are undoubtedly deep in the uncanny valley of disturbing AI-generated robot content, they have consistently gone viral, and for a reason immediately apparent in the new clip: The robots are very good.
Mick Jagger Spot and his three bandmates — Keith Richards Spot, Ronnie Wood Spot and Charlie Watts Spot — all do a disturbingly convincing rendition of their human-equivalents’ choreography. Of course, they lack faces or flesh, but still, there are grounds to ask who more sveltely gyrated their hips, Mick Jagger or his yellow robot dog impersonator.
The “Spot Me Up” robot-version clip Boston Dynamics posted to its YouTube account with 2.83 million subscribers racked up over 235,000 views within 24 hours of being posted on Friday.
“40 years ago, The Rolling Stones debuted their iconic ‘Tattoo You’ album. We’re helping them celebrate,” the video is captioned. The video was made in collaboration with Mercury Studios, Polydor Records & The Rolling Stones, with Boston Dynamics and Monica Thomas behind the robots’ dance moves.
Boston Dynamics was first founded in 1992 as a spinoff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where it became known for its dog-like quadrupedal robots.
“We didn’t want a robot doing robot-like dancing. We wanted it to do human dancing and, you know, when a human dances, the music has a beat and their whole body moves to it — their hands, their body, their head,” Boston Dynamics founder and chairperson Marc Raibert previously told the Associated Press of programming dancing robots. “And we tried to get all of those things involved and coordinated so that it, you know, it was … it looked like the robot was having fun and really moved with the music. And I think that had a lot to do with the result of the production.”
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