A robot entered graduate school in China (5 photos + 2 videos)
And no, this is not a joke - he will study drama and Peking opera. The Shanghai Theatre Academy has officially enrolled a humanoid robot named Xueba 01. Yes, that's right. A piece of iron. In drama. In graduate school. With a supervisor and a graduate student ID. 
The name Xueba (学霸) translates as "excellent student." And he's head and shoulders above any nerd. This guy (if you can call him that) is a product of the Chinese Academy, and his main job is to study art and interact with people as a full-fledged artist. 
Here are his performance characteristics:
Height: 1.75 m — a standard young specialist.
Weight: 30 kg — skinny, like an IT guy after a deadline.
Shell: silicone skin and well-developed facial expressions. We must give him credit, he looks like a guy from a drama.
Functions: emotion recognition, speech generation, motor skills, facial expression control, stage gestures (including those from traditional opera).
Xueba 01 has entered a doctoral program in drama and cinema, and will also study traditional Chinese opera. Professor Yang Qingqing, a local stage star and seasoned teacher, has been appointed his scientific advisor. Together, they are going to understand whether it is possible to "raise an 'artist' from artificial intelligence."
The first day of school is scheduled for September 14, 2025. And Xueba 01 will not just sit in the corner, but participate in productions, give advice, prompt texts, analyze scenes, control the voice and even act in plays.
And what does the robot itself say? Well, of course, it is a neural network with pre-trained lines, but who knows - maybe it has a character. Here is his quote:
"If I do not finish graduate school, Professor Yang promised that they will give me to the museum. Sounds good - I'll become part of the history of art."
He also promised that he would help people if they were having a hard time: play "white noise" during stressful moments, advise on choreography movements, give feedback on acting. Well, like a typical classmate, only without the hangover and whining.
Some local critics were tense: they said that "art is soul, experience and pain", not synthetics and calculations. But the robot is not trying to replace the actor. Its task is simply to study the interaction of man and machine on stage.
This project is not just PR, but part of the Chinese state program to integrate AI into the humanitarian sphere. Xueba 01 can already imitate complex stage images, analyze dramaturgy and offer stage solutions.
This is a real experiment in the spirit of sci-fi - and, oddly enough, with an almost human face.
