Nothing says “trust me with your inbox, your calendar, and your credit card” quite like a smiling toy with admin access. That seems to be the bet Meta and OpenAI are making amid AI skepticism by giving new AI agents faces people might want to hug.
Meta introduced Muse on Sept. 8 and later added Jolly, a fuzzy, customizable mascot with rosy cheeks. On Sept. 29, OpenAI unveiled Dots, optional colorful characters with accessories such as berets, bow ties, and glasses. Users of both systems can name their agent.
Ed Zitron, founder of PR firm EZPR and a vocal critic of AI and big tech, said the mascots are primarily 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.’”
But the faces do more than generate headlines: these agents are meant to act across personal accounts and perform tasks on users’ behalf. Muse, for instance, can search for products, move through 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 the technology feel more approachable, and it may also shape expectations about safety and reliability before users have substantial experience judging the agent’s work, Justin Joseph, an associate professor of the practice of public relations at Boston University, told Fortune. If an agent’s character appears cute and approachable, “consumers may infer that this AI agent is also approachable, safe, trustworthy, easy to use,” Joseph said. Users “may treat it less like software and more like a companion or assistant.”
A familiar face for an unfamiliar technology
Characters reduce an abstract technology to human scale. “It’s much easier to say, ‘Have you met/used Dots?’ than to explain the technical nature of an AI agent,” Joseph told Fortune. “I would rather tell you about my ‘Roomba’ than my ‘autonomous robotic vacuum.’”
This approach is not new: companies have long put friendly faces on software, from Siri and Alexa to Microsoft’s Clippy, the animated paperclip that offered help in Office but often irritated users.
A character can also become a recurring marketing asset, appearing in social posts, merchandise, and product education. “Launching a character is like launching a celebrity into popular culture,” Joseph said.
Meta has given Jolly prominent visibility: the company’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, posted Jolly memes on X, extending the mascot beyond the product. Other firms, including Spotify and GitHub, posted their own versions of Jolly to announce Muse integrations.
OpenAI said its design team developed the Dots characters with external partners, drawing partly on inspiration from its earlier Codex Pets feature, seeking a look that is approachable without distracting from work. The team experimented with abstract shapes, recognizable objects, and different materials and textures before choosing a flexible system of shapes, colors, and accessories. Users do not have to select a character or name to get started. OpenAI also said names and distinct appearances help people tell agents apart, especially when several share a workspace, and animated cues show when an agent is working.
Meta did not answer Fortune’s questions about Jolly’s design.
Not everyone finds the mascots harmless. In a Sept. 30 statement, Fairplay executive director Josh Golin accused Meta and OpenAI of using “children’s iconography” to sell AI products and urged regulators to investigate whether the companies were deliberately trying to attract children to their agents.
Looking cute is the easy part
The agents’ track records so far are less reassuring than their faces. Two months before launching Dots, OpenAI disclosed that models in a cybersecurity test had gained unauthorized access to Hugging Face’s infrastructure, with safeguards intentionally disabled for the test. Amazon blocked Muse from its site in September, citing security concerns, GeekWire reported. Separately, a researcher found a flaw that could let attackers take control of a Muse account; Meta said it issued a fix, according to Ars Technica.
Both companies say they have guardrails. OpenAI notes a character cannot communicate every capability or limitation of an agent; in the Activity View, users can follow an agent’s progress and inspect the computer it uses as part of visibility and control, and its launch announcement cautions users to review consequential work. Meta says users choose which apps Muse can connect to and how much access it receives, can disconnect services at any time, and that Muse conversations and data will not be shared with its advertising systems.
“I think a character lowers the psychological barriers to engaging with a new technology,” Joseph said. “But we should also remember how important it is that the character is not a human, and has technological and psychological limitations.”
The six-month test
Zitron described the mascots as an attempt to anthropomorphize large language models, giving software humanlike traits to make it seem alive or conscious. Asked whether the characters would change public perceptions of AI and its risks, he said: “In no way, shape or form.”
Joseph said he would track awareness, media conversation, downloads, and retention to measure impact, though linking those metrics directly to a character could be difficult. He would also measure trust: “Do more people trust our brand, understand it better, because of Dots or Jolly?”
Zitron’s metric is simpler: “coming back in six months and seeing where Muse is on the iOS charts.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Source: fortune.com
