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Comment by jason_zig | Hacker News Reader

i feel like when they style them all cute like that (see muse) it means they're problematic and invasive.

I think they're just meant to be friendly. I don't think it's that deep. They're useful and not scary and its marketing is meant to project that image.

Just like they always present Astra as useful and not scary?

You can consider the cute & fuzzy presentation of the new consumer AI agents an admission that the doom and gloom so far has been a marketing mistep. It's good that companies are trying to rectify the image of AI.

I was surprised by how much I liked the Muse avatar and its customization options. It’s very good at coming up with something decent looking based on your prompts, and animating it.

The services without the custom avatar now feel like they’re missing something.

As a kid I used to love the video game “Megaman Battle Network”, which depicts a world where everyone walks around with an PDA device carrying a fully customized AI buddy that navigates the internet for them. It was the first time I felt like we were getting close to that.

But even with the nostalgia, I don’t think I can ever connect up a Meta owned agent service to all of my accounts and information.

you don't have to give yourself up to irrational, anxious feelings.

Is it irrational?

Does no one remember the MS Paperclip?!?

Or how much paperclip was abhorred?

That's because it was pretty much a useless gimmick. If it was a capable AI assistant like Astra, it woudn't have been abhorred.

I feel like this should be memed as something like the "Jar-Jar Binks Marketing Flop": intentionally design something to be childishly adorable and inoffensive, which ironically makes it loathsome and offensive to adult customers.

Muse makes sense since it targets the general normies. Dots explicitly are targeting developers instead which makes it a bit weird.

Dots seem to me to be for the rest of general knowledge work and not specifically developers

Requires $100/month minimum, are non-developers paying that?

Of course they are. Why wouldn’t they?

- non-developer

Yes, they're trying to break into corporate knowledge work by appealing to efficient gains due to reducing busy work.

Just different interfaces on top of the same product (selling tokens)

I mean the fact that it's not available in the EU is a pretty big tell

i can't believe they straight up ripped the design from Muse

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