OpenAI this week unveiled Dots, persistent AI agents with their own cloud computers and access to connected apps. Users can personalise the agents, including giving them names, while OpenAI is positioning them as assistants capable of carrying out extended tasks rather than merely answering questions.
The launch follows Meta’s introduction of Muse in September. Its default avatar, Jolly, is a cream-coloured, rounded character with small dark eyes, pink cheeks and a soft, toy-like appearance. Meta describes Muse as a personal AI agent that can send emails, book travel, fill forms and work across services chosen by the user.
The resemblance between such characters and toys is not accidental in design terms. Rounded faces, large eyes, soft proportions and simplified features belong to a visual vocabulary psychologists have studied for decades. Research into “baby schema”, or Kindchenschema, has found that infant-like features can increase perceptions of cuteness and stimulate attention and caregiving motivation.
A 2009 study led by Melanie Glocker at the University of Pennsylvania manipulated infant photographs to vary features including facial roundness, forehead height and eye size. Participants rated faces containing stronger baby-schema characteristics as cuter and reported greater motivation to care for them. Separate brain-imaging research found that such features can engage neural systems associated with reward and motivation.
That does not establish that a cute AI character automatically makes users trust software, or that companies adopting mascots are deliberately exploiting a biological reflex. But it helps explain why softness has become useful design language as AI products move from passive chatbots towards systems that can take actions on a person’s behalf.
The shift creates a particular design problem. An agent that reads email, remembers preferences, navigates websites or makes purchases must ask users for permissions that can feel consequential. A conventional software interface can emphasise machinery and complexity. A character can instead make the interaction resemble a conversation with a helper.
Meta says Muse was designed to work like messaging another person. The company says users control which services it can access, that sensitive actions require approval and that interactions are not shared with its advertising systems. OpenAI, meanwhile, has described Dots as persistent agents designed to work with connected applications.
For technology companies, mascots also offer a recognisable identity in a market where many underlying products can appear similar. A named character can give an otherwise abstract model a face, personality and visual continuity across phones, computers and, increasingly, wearable devices. Meta plans to bring Muse to its AI glasses, where users will be able to summon an agent by name.
Psychology and technology author Nathalie Nahai has connected the broader revival of technology mascots with public mistrust of large technology companies. She has argued that cute, anthropomorphic characters can soften the image of corporations increasingly perceived as remote or powerful. Her observation adds a caution to the trend: friendliness in presentation should not be confused with evidence about privacy, reliability or safety.
That distinction matters more as agents acquire greater autonomy. A plush-looking avatar may reduce the emotional distance between a user and a complex system, but the consequential questions remain technical and institutional: what information the agent can see, what actions it can perform, how mistakes are corrected and what safeguards govern its behaviour.
Researchers have also found that baby-schema effects extend beyond infants. Studies involving animals and even inanimate objects suggest that youthful proportions can attract attention and encourage positive responses. Marketing has long used mascots for precisely that ability to make organisations or products easier to recognise and relate to.
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