It’s cute. It’s cuddly. And it wants your data.

Meta hopes its new AI agent will win people over by being cute.

Muse, the tech giant’s cuddly, doll-like AI agent, shot to the top of the Apple App Store charts after it was featured this week at the company’s Meta Connect conference.

The company is touting the tool, designed to help people with their everyday tasks, as an AI agent “built for everyone,” including those who lack experience with technology.

AI agents, which are systems that automatically execute tasks on a user’s behalf, are rapidly becoming ubiquitous in online workspaces, social apps and personal devices.

Meet Mark Zuckerberg's personal Muse AI agent

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the default Muse avatar, which is cream-colored and has beady black eyes and an upward smile, is named “Jolly,” for its “jolly and completely customizable character and personality.”

Muse is being launched as tech companies seek to make their AI-powered products more palatable to humans, often by giving them cute, almost petlike appearances, voices and personalities. Experts have said design choices that humanize technology may become more common as robot-human interaction grows more prevalent in everyday spaces, as cuteness evokes “deep-seated biological responses” in people.

“It was only about six months ago…

Original source: https://www.nbcnews.com/business