Victoria Song on Meta Muse’s Cuteness

Victoria Song, in her Optimizer column/newsletter for The Verge:

I’ve been aggressively avoiding Muse since it launched a few weeks ago. Sure, some of that is because I was busy testing other devices. But the number-one reason why is that I am horribly vulnerable when faced with extreme cuteness. Alas, at Meta Connect, I couldn’t escape this pink-cheeked fella with his plush ivory fur, and so I finally downloaded the app once I returned to my hotel room. He was plastered on every screen during the keynote. My eye twitched with maximum cute aggression when Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth showed us his Muse agent Cooper. The duderino was dressed in a lil pilot outfit because he’s Boz’s test pilot. My face scrunched with rage when Cooper picked up his pudgy round arms to wave. It’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen at a tech keynote. The tiny demon in my head thought to itself, “I WANT TO SQUISH ITS LITTLE FACE.” Most people I know would say that Meta stuffing an AI agent into everything and anything feels sinister. Now look at Jolly’s little smile. Tell me it doesn’t make the corners of your mouth twitch slightly upward. If you honestly say no, you’re stronger than I am.

What attracted Song to Muse is what has, to be honest, turned me off. I don’t think it’s because I’m stronger than Song. I just think it’s weird that Muse wants me to give it a name and design a cartoon mascot for it. My impression of Muse isn’t that it’s even vaguely cute. I’m not stupid. I see that it’s supposed to be cute. I can see why some people see it as cute in the way it’s clearly intended to be cute. But I just see it as phony. And I despise phoniness as much as Holden Caulfield did.

My wife and son both love cilantro. I can’t stand it. I’m one of those people who thinks it tastes not just like soap, but soap that I’d regret washing my hands with because if I did I’d hate how my hands smell and I’d want to find another sink with different soap to scrub that off. I don’t have better taste than my wife or son. (My wife says quite the opposite.) It just registers differently for me.

Muse’s cutesy appearance and tone hits my mind like cilantro hits my tongue. I want my humans and animals warm, and my computers cold. Fun? Sure! But not cute. That’s a fine line between fun and cute, but I know it when I see it, just as surely as I know when something has cilantro in it.

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