By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

Miami (CNN) — A pack of robot quadrupeds trot around the floor, bearing the hyperrealistic silicone faces of tech billionaires and famous artists. One, with the uncanny head of Elon Musk, purses his lips as he circles around. Just beside him, Andy Warhol and Mark Zuckerberg nearly collide. Further back, Pablo Picasso takes a gentle rest on his haunches and stares off into space. Occasionally, they each tip backwards and throw their heads back to expel a printed artwork from their rears while flashing “poop mode” from a screen on their backs. The half-humanoid-half-canine creatures look like something out of a cyberpunk game — or a fever dream. But they aren’t roving your nightmares (yet). Instead they are on the floor of one of the wealthiest art fairs in the world, at Art Basel in Miami.

“We are not ready for the future,” the latest project from the artist Beeple, titled “Regular Animals,” warns. On the first day of the art fair, Beeple, real name Mike Winkelmann, stood inside of the pen, picking up the strewn artworks to offer them to onlookers. Two of the robots are Winkelmann’s own doppelganger, sporting his haircut and glasses among those resembling Musk, Warhol, Zuckerberg, Picasso and Jeff Bezos.

“I’m the odd one out, I’ll say that,” he said of his creations, smiling. The images generated by each robot capture what they are seeing, as they see it, each in a different style relevant to the person whose face they share.

“They’re constantly taking pictures and reinterpreting the world through the lens of these different characters,” he explained. He showed different examples of the prints, which come in distinctive visual styles.

“This one looks like an Andy Warhol, how he saw the world. The Picasso image reinterprets the world as Picasso saw it,” he said. As for the tech billionaires, he added: “We’re increasingly seeing the world through the lens of how they would like us to see it, because they control these very powerful algorithms. They judge what we see in the world and for many people, it’s their primary source of news. They have unilateral control over how we see the world, in many ways.”

You may remember Beeple from the height of the NFT (nonfungible token) art frenzy in 2021, when the artist stunned the market by selling a 5,000-image digital collage for $69.3 million at Christie’s. In the first NFT sale ever at auction, he broke multiple market records and suddenly found himself the third most expensive living artist in the world, topped only by David Hockney and Jeff Koons.

Since then, Winkelmann has focused on growing his Charleston, South Carolina-based studio as a hub for experimental digital art, and has continued presenting work at major art institutions, most recently exhibiting work at The Shed in New York and LACMA in Los Angeles. He’s also added a hallucinatory stream of AI reaction art to the chaos of American politics, including an Oval Office portrait of New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani sitting in US President Donald Trump’s lap while holding a framed poster of “Wicked: For Good.”

NFT art, meanwhile, followed its boom with a bust, which Winkelmann called “inevitable” in a recent podcast, due to the amount of “dumb sh**” produced during that period, he explained. “I was the person the next day after the big sale being like, ‘mmm guys I hate to say it, I think this is a bubble,’” he told ArtTactic.

But within the past year, digital art more broadly has entered a period of significant growth, per Art Basel’s 2025 industry report, and the art fair franchise has committed to the medium with its own dedicated section in Miami, Zero 10, which of course, is where the pooping robot dogs can be found. And, if you haven’t guessed it by now, the printed artworks are not just prints; they are in fact, NFTs, perhaps fitting for how many times NFTs have been called “bullsh**” on the internet. But — after the dust has settled on all the dead NFT art circa 2021 — Winkelmann believes there’s real innovation happening.

On the first day of the fair, the Zero 10 section was buzzing, with “Regular Animals” drawing a crowd. Spectators did double-takes at each of the faces and pulled out their phones to film the bizarre scene at hand. Often overheard: “Disgusting.” “Disturbing.” Also: “Brilliant.”

“That’s… different,” said one woman with a pause.

At one point, two small (actual) dogs inexplicably on the art fair floor began barking at the robots. Winkelmann allowed them into the pen and into the fray.

“The reaction’s been pretty good, I’m not gonna lie,” he said. “I think it’s something where it’s very hard for you to walk past and be like, ‘okay, I’ve seen that.’ You’ve not seen that.”

But, he added, he believes other artists will make work in this vein as we continue to question our relationships to intelligent technology, and those advancements continue to speed up.

“I think it is something you will see more — this idea that sculptures are these living things that are dynamic and have more anthropomorphized features and we ascribe emotion to them,” he said. “I think it’s something you’re going to see increasingly in society as robots get more powerful.”

These sculptures may not live to see the day, as they have a limited metaphorical lifespan. Their primary function, to record pictures and store them on the blockchain, will cease after three years, Winkelmann explained. It gives the creatures a more finite end, though they’ll keep their basic motor skills. By the first hour of the fair, each animal was already sold, the little Zuckerbergs and Musks and Beeples ready to be rehomed.

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