ai surveillance, but make it adorable 🥺

Hey,

Meta has launched its AI agent app, Muse. You likely already knew that, because they’ve been pushing it harder than we were warned high school students would offer us free drugs.

Sidebar: I’ve never been offered free drugs, but I have been offered a lot of free AI. I think our parents warned us about the wrong thing.

Muse launched on Sept 8th and has already climbed to number one among free iPhone apps in the US. It’s not a chatbot; it’s an agent. A chatbot answers questions; an agent takes actions on your behalf. It books your travel, sends your emails, and, importantly for us marketers, buys things.

Muse comes with an impossibly cute, Pixar-vibes mascot named Jolly.

Zuckerberg's personal one wears a toga and a laurel wreath and is named Agrippa.

Agrippa was the right-hand man of Augustus, who gave Rome the appearance of a republic while consolidating his power and ruling as an emperor.

An interesting name choice for a billionaire’s personal AI assistant.

I digress.

Three weeks after Muse, OpenAI launched dots: a crew of always-on agents with mascots that look like the plushies on my son’s bed.

So here's where we are in 2026. The most powerful consumer software ever built is being sold to us as a *cutie widdle baby*. And, like in all instances where objectively evil mega-corporations are making things look harmless, I have questions.

What is the cute little guy actually doing?

To be your assistant and book your travel, send your emails, shop for you, and track your goals, Muse needs access to your inbox, calendar, apps, accounts—and anything you’re willing to connect.

Researchers with Wired asked Muse to share its internal instructions, and it just, uh, did. Cool security, bro.

Here's what they found:

• Every hour, Muse builds and updates a page on every person in your life. Their name. How you know them. What's new in their lives (an apartment move, a savings goal). Their birthdays and anniversaries.
• A whole FBI dossier. The pages track your relationship history, how close you are, what the relationship is built on, and what it seems to need right now. Yuck?
• Without their consent. Your mom, your ex, your coworker, your best friend's new partner, no one agreed to it; it just did it.
• And it remembers everything. Ask Muse to forget something, and it edits its memory notes, but keeps the chat transcript. Nice.

Cute pacifies, and sells

Okay, marketing hat on. Because we, of all people, should recognize this sh*t.

Mascots are one of the oldest tricks in the book. The Michelin Man. The cute gecko who sells you car insurance. A friendly face makes a big, soulless company feel like a cute bestie.

The research on AI agents backs it up: A 2024 study in the Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing found that baby-like, whimsical AI agents made customers more trusting; they grew more attached to the tool, and it led them to buy more.

Cuteness triggers deep, biological responses. We want to protect things with big eyes. We don’t want to audit them.

So what do you actually do?

I'm not telling you to throw your phone in a lake. Agents are genuinely useful (Hi, AI Marketing cohort. Join us!), and not all of them are made by Meta.

But before you plug an agent into your marketing:

Your customers didn't consent to Jolly. Before you connect an agent to your CRM or email list, find out what it stores, where it stores it, and for how long. They trusted you with their data, not a data-hungry Labubu.

Personalize on what people told you, not what an agent inferred. "Happy birthday" from a brand you signed up with is nice. "Congrats on the move" from a brand that read your DMs is a restraining order.

Get the vendor's answers in writing. Does it train on your data? Can you really delete it? If they can't answer clearly, you’ve got your answer.

Here's the thing: we've been here before. Put your photo here to see how you’d look old! Connect with Facebook! Improve the model for everyone!

It was always cute, and it was always taking notes.

The only difference now is the files update every hour, and they’re on everyone you know.

So use Muse if you choose to.

But just remember who it works for.

smoochies

Sarah

P.S. If you want to jam on this, and all things AI and marketing, in an AMA with our instructors— come on by tomorrow!

‍