Meta has launched the Muse “charm” device, a cute AI assistant with a 2-inch screen, capable of live conversations, answering emails, booking travel, and doing weekly food shopping, as it seeks to counter backlash against its smart glasses.
Unveiled by Mark Zuckerberg at the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, the device has drawn comparisons with Tamagotchis due to its cutesy avatar. “We’ve packed a lot of technology into this little guy,” the Meta founder told the San Francisco audience. The “little guy” could fit, like a Labubu, on to a keychain or bag.
Why cuteness matters
According to Katie Seaborn, a Cambridge associate professor who has been researching cuteness in computing, it’s cute because it “basically looks like a baby”. Joshua Paul Dale, professor at Chuo University in Tokyo and author of Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired our Brains and Conquered the World, noted that Meta also introduced a new pair of smart glasses with no camera. “Everyone hates cameras in smart glasses. But if the camera is contained in a charm you wear around your neck, it shifts the agency. Suddenly, you’re not recording people. It’s just a cute little animated avatar looking out on the world.”
“Clearly,” says Dale, “what Meta is trying to do is make Muse into a companion. And it’s doing it in the simplest possible way … It’s using a very simplified, tiny 2-inch screen to encourage you to anthropomorphise the figure on it so that you treat it as if it’s human even though you know it’s not.”
Cuteness as strategy
Its cuteness is, according to Seaborn, “strategic”. “It’s very natural to emerge from this controversy with a technology that uses cuteness because … it’s so weak. Don’t worry about it. You can trust us.” Seaborn, who has just moved to the University of Cambridge from Japan, points out that “this is something that is very normal in Japan. So the first thing you notice when you go there is that every single thing has a mascot. The government organisations, the media companies, the businesses, they all have a cute mascot”.
Seaborn has studied the “impacts cuteness can have on people”. “We’ve been seeing cuteness applied as a design strategy for different purposes. We know [that it] has certain impacts on people.” For one thing “cuteness is a way for certain social interactions to take place or to be smoothed over”. There is also a “natural link between cuteness and deception … I call it ‘charming and disarming’, because one of the things cuteness does to us unconsciously, it’s just how our brain processes it, is lets down our guard. We can’t really help it.”
Generational and cultural reactions
Whether Muse will catch on when it is released in December remains to be seen. Different generations are likely to react differently. “That’s so AI!” is the phrase gen Alpha are using to dismiss anything they think is inauthentic. For many gen Zers who are au fait with having a cuddly toy hanging from their bags, most typically in the form of a Labubu, it might feel less of a wrench. For older generations there will be nostalgic associations given its resemblance to older technologies. Embedded in it, says Seaborn, “[is] this legacy of these cute kind of gamified pet sort of things like Tamagotchi and Pocky Pikachu”.
Different cultural contexts will affect how it is received. Seaborn’s research has found that “Americans were actually less likely to be deceived compared with Japanese people … Because in Japan robots are heroes, they’re like babies”. Whereas “in western culture they’re often presented in the public imagination as kind of scary, potentially broken, sinister devices”. In UK focus groups, people reported a “gut feeling” that something was wrong when cuteness was part of a deceptive design idea. “People felt like something was off, but they couldn’t articulate what it was.”
But the picture, says Seaborn, is changing. “Because cuteness [or kawaii] has been a cultural export of Japan and other nations for a while now … there might be a slow cultural shift happening in terms of how we orient ourselves towards cuteness and what we accept as adults.” While Dale is “not rushing out to buy one”, he “will say, however, that when I’m 80 years old I’ll definitely want one of these things. I want to wear it around my neck always, and I want the camera on all the time, so it can tell me where I left my glasses.”
