With Meta’s Muse Charm, AI enters its kawaii era

AI has an image problem, to say the least, with public fears on the rise that the technology could lead to mass unemployment and human extinction. So for its new AI agent Muse and an associated device, Meta is dialing down the fear factor and cranking up the cute. To sell AI hardware to the masses, Meta is going kawaii. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company’s forthcoming Muse Charm on Wednesday, a handheld device for its new AI agent. It looks like a futuristic Tamagotchi and personifies the chatbot on the screen as a fuzzy, rotund beige mascot. You can name the creature yourself. Instagram’s Adam Mosseri named his “Max.” (Facebook and Instagram introduced their users to the avatar this week to entice downloads of the Muse app.) “We packed the whole Muse experience, including the whole real-time voice and avatar stack, into something that fits on a keychain and is always available to talk to,” Zuckerberg said at Meta Connect. Instead of visualizing its new AI agent as non-anthropromorphic glowing orb, like Siri, or a cursor and text, like ChatGPT, Muse is a cute monster avatar. Meta could have gone down the route of its competitors, but it didn’t. Instead its choice shows…