Meta, for once, is doing something pretty novel in the AI sphere. It’s created — and heavily marketed — a cute little mascot for its new AI product, something that none of the other major AI players like OpenAI and Anthropic have done. (Microsoft kind of tried it with its “Mico” Copilot companion character, but it wasn’t given anywhere close to the same level of marketing push.)
It’s too early to say if it’s worked or not, but Meta is clearly trying to meme its mascot Jolly — which looks somewhere between a Labubu and a Fall Guys bean — into becoming a viral sensation.
Spearheading this effort is the zoomer head of its Superintelligence Labs Alexandr Wang, who’s been relentlessly posting AI-generated memes featuring the fuzzy little guy. And some of them depict pretty, shall we say, risqué scenarios.
One shows Jolly winking at you over the shoulder with its butt teasingly pointed in the viewer’s direction, apparently in an attempt to promote Muse integration into the cloud system Box. And another shows Jolly in bed with two men, recreating a scene from the 2023 film “Challengers,” in which Zendaya basically tricks Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist into sucking each other’s faces during a three-way makeout.
And finally, another one of Wang’s creations mocks Maroon 5 singer Adam Levine’s infamously cringe sexts by showing the pop star losing his mind to a picture of Jolly’s derriere in an Instagram DM.
Wang captioned, “some of y’all way too thirsty for muse,” as if he wasn’t consciously trying to invite people to create exactly these kinds of tawdry memes. So far, the strategy is working.
Here, regrettably, is Jolly with its legs spread and waiting to receive. Someone else AI-generated a video of Wang petting Jolly’s jiggly butt. But the pièce de résistance is probably this recreation of an infamous adult meme:
After we first published this piece, we heard from many authorities on internet horniness who opined that there is very little — or perhaps zero — actual organic thirst for the Muse mascot. In their analysis, Meta is trying to meme up some lust for Muse, but it’s not catching on. They raised a compelling point: the Rule34 community, which is a sort of online database for often-lewd fan art of fictional characters, doesn’t currently feature a single piece of fan art for Muse.
One thing’s for sure: Meta really wants this mascot to stick. Other brands, like GitHub and Spotify, have joined in to post their own Jolly riffs, announcing how they’ve integrated Muse. Meta also released a feature that allows you to customize your Muse mascot or change its appearance entirely, and give it a voice. It also announced a Tamagotchi-like device called a “Charm” that lets you carry the companion-slash-personal-assist wherever you go. Chances are if you’ve opened Instagram or Facebook recently you’ve seen Jolly pop up on your screen. For now, the little munchkin is inescapable.
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