The robot apocalypse is coming to cinema. But instead of blowing things up on the big screen, the BlabDroids are attempting to make what could be the first documentary ever filmed and directed by robots.

Created by artist and roboticist Alex Reben for his master's thesis at MIT, the BlabDroids are tiny, adorable robotic cinematographers who will be filming interviews at this week's Tribeca Film Festival in New York as part of the the film festival's transmedia Storyscapes program. At least 20 BlabDroids will zip around to attendees–they're self-propelled via motorized wheels– and ask them often very personal questions like, "Tell me something that you've never told a stranger before," "What's the worst thing you've done to someone," and "Who do you love most in the world?"

Each droid carries a digital camera, a speaker that asks a series of pre-programmed questions to ask whomever it encounters and a button to be pushed to prompt new queries.

"We plan to give the robots to some interesting New Yorkers," filmmaker Brent Hoff, who is working on the BlabDroid project with Reben, said in an email to Wired. "Hopefully Anthony Weiner and some Broadway types."

The robots, which are very adorable and voiced by a 7-year-old boy, are intended to test the theory of MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum's "ELIZA effect," which found that people are inclined to anthropomorphize computers and thus engage emotionally with artificial intelligence. Although this initially lead Weizenbaum to worry about AI's potential to manipulate, Reben and Hoff have created the BlabDroids to appear comforting and non-judgmental, and to capture meaningful interactions with their subjects.

The robots did a bit of film-making already as part of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (see the amazingly honest results in the video below) and, according to Hoff, the most interesting discovery so far is "how people seem so hungry to share themselves" in ways they normally aren't asked to.

"People are constantly being asked to like someone's Kickstarter page or some new dumb show, but it is unheard of in human culture in 2013 for anyone to be asked their opinion on the difference between living and existing, or what's the last nice thing they have done, sadly," Hoff said. "So perhaps the real use of this project will be to get some robots out into the world and let people express themselves in an ongoing way."

The footage filmed during the Tribeca fest, which begins Wednesday, will be screened on Sunday during the festival. After that Hoff plans to compile the footage into a currently-unnamed short documentary to screen at additional film festivals. Two of the robotic filmmakers have also been dispatched to Fox's new production house Animation Domination HD (or, ADHD for short) in Los Angeles to interview "Nick Offerman-types and all the cool kids who come in for shows," Hoff said. (Hopefully they'll actually get Axe Cop Nick Offerman.) Whatever the BlabDroids capture in Hollywood will be developed into a stand-alone doc about the ADHD experiment. Once those projects are completed, the plan is to produce consumer-ready BlabDroids to allow anyone to make a documentary with them.

Prior to the BlabDroid documentary Hoff was the editor of Wholphin, the quarterly DVD magazine put out by McSweeney's that released the neuroscience-of-love documentary The Love Competition. Wholphin has been put on hold and when asked whether he might ever release the BlabDroid documentary on DVD – either as a Wholphin project or otherwise – Hoff's reply was further proof that new kinds of machines are taking over the movie business.

"Sadly, DVDs are functionally dead and thus Wholphin is on a hiatus while we figure out if there's even a viable way to do digital releases," Hoff said. "I have interns who wish to come work for Wholphin, but have no one in their entire friend group with a DVD player to even watch the issues! True story."