Meta has Muse, OpenAI has Dots, Anthropic has Clawd, and Notion has a character of its own. Buck chief creative officer Kevin Walker argues that these mascots offer people a way to relate to increasingly capable, hard-to-understand AI systems, while warning that a friendly face can make a system seem more trustworthy than it has earned.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
In an essay for It’s Nice That, Walker connects the current crop of AI characters to anthropomorphism: our habit of assigning human motives and personalities to things. A name, a face or a blinking dot can make a complicated system feel easier to approach. As AI tools search, remember and act, Walker suggests, that impulse becomes particularly tempting.
He draws on Buck’s work with Notion’s AI character, describing how animation can give a simple face different states for searching, writing, waiting or encountering an error. The character is not there to make the underlying AI more capable, he says, but to make an unfamiliar interaction feel warmer and more understandable.
Why it matters
Interface choices shape how people interpret a system. A character might help explain what an assistant is doing, or make a pause feel less like a broken button. But familiarity can also encourage trust, and trust is not evidence that the system understands, knows or feels anything.
That distinction matters as AI assistants take on more tasks. A mascot can make an interaction more approachable; it cannot explain a model’s limits on its own. The design challenge is to make systems legible without implying a human-like mind behind the felt eyebrows.
Our read
Walker’s strongest point is that this is more than a branding trend: characters can become part of how people understand and use AI. That is a useful design tool, provided the warmth does not quietly do the work of proving reliability. Cute is a visual style, not a safety feature.
What to watch
- Whether AI characters make system states and limitations clearer, rather than merely more charming.
- How products distinguish a designed personality from genuine understanding or emotion.
- Whether users trust character-led assistants differently from less personified interfaces.
Discussion spark: Should AI assistants use mascots to make unfamiliar tools easier to approach, or does giving them a personality risk encouraging trust they have not earned?
Sources and evidence
- Source update (12 October 2026, 00:00 UTC)
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