Whitney Cummings

Whitney Cummings (born 1982) co-created CBS’s long-running “2 Broke Girls,” starred in her own NBC sitcom “Whitney,” and became one of stand-up’s sharpest voices on gender and relationships. In 2019 she did something no comedian had tried: she commissioned Realbotix — the company behind the RealDoll — to build an animatronic, AI-driven replica of herself, complete with a silicone body molded to her likeness and a robotic head that moves its eyes and mouth.

Bearclaw, the robot co-star

The robot, nicknamed Bearclaw, cost her over $100,000 and became the centerpiece of her Netflix special “Can I Touch It?” — walking on stage mid-set and fooling parts of the audience. The special’s stance was pointedly pro-robot: Cummings argued that panic over robots replacing romantic partners was overblown, and told The Daily Beast that sex robots would be “like iPhones” within twenty years while ranking them far down “the list of things that are going to ruin society.”

Cummings has kept exploring the territory since, dissecting robotics, neuroscience and human-machine attachment in a 2019 conversation with Lex Fridman and showing Bearclaw off to Joe Rogan. Her fascination comes with nuance — she has mused about how easily humans project feelings onto machines and what that projection does to us — but her instinct is to run at the technology with a microphone rather than away from it.

She called the robot “kind of a Rorschach test — everyone projects their own shit onto it,” which doubled as the special’s thesis: the interesting thing about AI replicas is not the machine, but what people reveal when they meet one.