Tech companies have an adorable plan to make you forget about AI's threat to jobs and humanity

Jolly wants to help make your life easier — and be cute while doing it. The mascot for Meta's Muse AI is a slightly rotund, plush creature with rosy cheeks, big eyes, and a toothless grin. It can wear clothes or little headphones when he's "working" on tasks for you.

Jolly joins a growing group of creatures vying for the hearts and minds of potential AI users. There are the round, mouthless dots of OpenAI, the fluffy Genspark lobster, and Grok users have adopted a little teal alien named "Groklet." All adorable, all plushy, and all debuting as the general populace was starting to worry that AI would maybe kill us all.

The idea behind Jolly and the rest of the mascots is simple: make us forget about all that AI doom-and-gloom and learn to love it. They play on our most human, primal instincts, distancing us from the fact that they represent something distinctly non-human. This round, fun little creature is your friend! He's going to work on your behalf! The fuzzy little charms also tap into our sense of nostalgia. Everyone I spoke to for this piece immediately had a connection to the Muse avatar: Some said it reminded them of a Tamagotchi, or MySpace avatars, or Baymax, the lovable robot from Big Hero 6.

It's not the first time that cuteness has arisen in response to a collective sense of unease. In the past, the trait has been wielded as a comforting salve, a PR pivot, or to put a smiling face on something more complex. Cute has proven to be a powerful tool, and AI companies hope they can ride that wave into America's hearts — and computers.

The most visible — and successful — use of cute culture was in Japan following post-World War II. Fluffy mascots, manga, and stationery were used to shift the narrative about the country away from its aggressive, imperial history toward one of an approachable cultural destination. This shift is best personified by Hello Kitty, the now-ubiquitous cat-like mascot created in 1974 as an emblem of kawaii, the Japanese term for cute. Designed to appeal to Japanese women with newfound spending power — and their children — the cat avatar has since become a literal cultural emissary, bringing comfort t

Beyond Japan, the deployment of cute as a culture-shaping force seems to repeat across the years. Gen Zers embraced Y2K nostalgia during the pandemic — a marked contrast to their Zoom-first era. Another 2020 hit was the video game "Animal Crossing: New Horizons," as gamers stuck at home clamored for the coziness of tending to animated life. Cultural theorist Sianne Ngai calls cuteness "an aestheticization of powerlessness" — for a consumer to feel something is cute, they need to feel they can wield power over it, giving them a sense of calm control. On the grim end, cuteness was used by Purdue

Rebecca Kowalewicz, a digital marketing VP and millennial-Gen-X-cusper in Philadelphia, dabbled with a few AI platforms, but none were as fun as Muse. Jolly played on her sense of bygone days, reminding her of choosing a MySpace avatar. And Kowalewicz went one step further: She fed the software a photo of her late dog, Doctor Watson — a rescued coonhound pointer mix — and it quickly generated an animated version of him to replace Jolly. Now, Doctor Watson smiles at her, types, and moves his head. She's so endeared to the agent that she feels more inclined to stick with it.

In addition to personifying inanimate ideas or technologies, coziness and cuteness can also psychologically soothe us in uncertain times. Take Japan: already steeped in postwar cuteness, the country saw a renewed boom in coziness after its property bubble burst in 1990. People said it felt healing, Dale tells me, temporarily easing their woes amid financial and job-market upheaval. Similarly, agents can endear themselves to users by solving a task that causes dismay — with a little smile.

A friendly avatar helping you plug away at all of the worst parts of the job search is the latest attempt by AI companies to target a new segment of customers: Everyday folks who were turned off by the early, austere chatbots and spooked by the rush of AI doomer news.

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