A Clippy marketing moment with Muse: ‘Meta has given AI a cute face’

Nothing says ‘trust me with your inbox, your calendar, and your credit card’ quite like a smiling toy with admin access. At least that seems to be the bet Meta and OpenAI are making amid all the AI doomerism talk, giving their new AI agents faces people might want to hug.

Meta introduced Muse on Sept. 8 and later gave it Jolly, a fuzzy, customizable mascot with rosy cheeks. On Sept. 29, OpenAI unveiled Dots, whose optional colorful characters sport accessories like berets, bow ties, and glasses. Users of both can even give their agent a name.

Ed Zitron, founder of PR firm EZPR and an increasingly vocal and influential critic of AI and big tech, said he sees the mascots primarily as a publicity strategy. 

“It’s entirely marketing,” he told Fortune. “It exists to get quoted in articles that say that ‘Meta has given AI a cute face.’”

Fair enough—that’s this article (absent the marketing part). But the faces aren’t just decoration. These agents are designed to work across personal accounts and carry out tasks on users’ behalf.  Muse, for example, can search for products, navigate checkout, and prepare a purchase for final approval. According to Meta, it presents the total for the consumer to approve before paying through Stripe’s Link service.

A friendly face can make that technology feel approachable—but it may also shape expectations about its safety and reliability before users have much experience judging its work, Justin Joseph, an associate professor of the practice of public relations at Boston University, told Fortune. If an agent’s character comes off as cute, friendly, and approachable, “consumers may infer that this AI agent is also approachable, safe,........

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