AI's mascots: why the most advanced technology needs little human-made characters

This opinion piece, published in It's Nice That on 12 October 2026, is written by Kevin Walker, chief creative officer at the agency BUCK. It starts from an observation: several AI companies are wrapping their systems in names, faces and personalities. The author cites Muse (Meta), Dots (OpenAI), Claw'd (Anthropic) and Notion's little face. His underlying question is why the future needs so many "little characters".

Walker opens with a personal anecdote. He was the youngest of three siblings, and his two older sisters drafted him into their puppet productions in a small white wooden theatre in the family basement in the 1980s. He would often get bored halfway through a show and cause chaos with his puppet. Even so, he says he never broke character: as soon as a piece of felt with two glued-on eyes was on his hand, "it was alive", with motives, opinions and enemies. From this he draws the central idea of the piece: all it takes to turn something into someone is a bit of felt, some glue and a healthy dose of make-believe.

The author acknowledges that part of this is simple branding, because mascots work. He mentions classics such as Tony the Tiger, the Michelin Man, the Pillsbury Doughboy, Mr. Clean and Grimace. He also notes that mascots are making a strong comeback beyond AI: sports mascots are celebrities, old characters are being pulled from the archives, and brands that once spoke in impeccable typography are unleashing strange creatures on social media. But he believes nostalgia is not enough of an explanation. His thesis is that the world is strange right now: we came out of lockdown and ran straight into an immediate technological shift, we are connected to everyone yet talk constantly about loneliness, and we live alongside powerful, incomprehensible systems. He says he sees that mix of excitement and anxiety in his team, in clients and in friends, and that when "the ground turns to jelly", humans tend to put a face on it.

To explain this, he turns to an academic paper, "On Seeing Human", by Nicholas Epley, Adam Waytz and John Cacioppo, on anthropomorphism, that is, the tendency to attribute motivations, personality and emotions to non-human things. The authors sum it up in the acronym SEEK, which Walker breaks down into three factors. Sociality is the desire for connection: when it is scarce, we look for it elsewhere, as when we talk to our pets or name our car. "Effectance" is the desire to understand and predict our environment: faced with complexity, we say the computer "is being stubborn" rather than talking about memory allocation or thermal throttling. Elicited knowledge means using what we know best, ourselves, as a model for understanding what is not us; that is why two headlights and a grille look like eyes and a mouth, and a blinking dot seems to be thinking.

According to the author, AI triggers all of these levers. We want connection, we face technologies that almost no one fully understands, and those technologies behave in ways that remind us of ourselves: we talk to them and they reply, they search, remember, recommend and increasingly act on our behalf. The more alien technology becomes, the more urgently we make it familiar. None of these systems needs a face to function, but perhaps we need one to know how to relate to them. He describes it as a very old trick: give it eyes, a name and a personality to have "a way in".

Walker brings first-hand experience. BUCK worked with Notion on its AI experience, building on a face originally designed by illustrator Roman Muradov, which, according to the author, achieved something very economical with just a few lines, eyes, eyebrows and a nose. The studio's job was to bring it to life by asking the usual animation questions: how does it think, what does it do while searching, how does it say hello, what does waiting feel like, what does an error look like and what happens when it writes. He explains that timing suggests thought, anticipation suggests intent and hesitation suggests doubt, so a handful of pixels can seem shy or curious. These behaviours were mapped to different states (thinking, writing, searching, greeting, error) and expanded over time. He stresses that the aim was not to make the AI more impressive, since Notion already had the technology, but to make an unfamiliar interaction warmer and easier to understand. That, he says, is "mascot 101": it doesn't explain the technology, it offers an emotional handle.

The piece also warns of a tension. A face can make something complex easier to understand, but it can also make it seem more understandable than it really is. Personality creates familiarity and familiarity can create trust, but that trust has to be earned. For Walker, there is a difference between helping someone know how to interact with a system and encouraging them to believe it is more human, wiser or more emotionally aware than it is. Even so, he does not think this tension makes anthropomorphisation bad, but interesting: the urge to humanise these systems says something about what we need from them and from one another.

His reading is that, while we keep hearing that AI will make the future less human, one of our most immediate responses has been to surround it with signs of humanity: names, faces, voices, moods, quirks and stories. Good mascots, he argues, offer something a logo or abstract software cannot: someone to have a relationship with. A character can surprise, annoy, disappoint, get into trouble or come back with a new haircut. That is why, he says, the best mascots are not "logos with arms" but narrative systems, and they demand real storytelling: knowing their personality, their history, their voice and their arc, knowing what they will do and what they will never do, and, above all, believing in them.

The conclusion is hopeful. Despite all the talk about how AI is changing creativity, the author finds it reassuring that we are still using very old creative tools to make sense of it: character, performance, story and make-believe. Making something seem alive is still a craft that requires observation, empathy, timing, humour and often restraint, as well as someone who cares about deciding exactly how an eyebrow should move when a little face is thinking. In his view, humans are still doing what they always have: telling stories, creating characters, seeing faces in the clouds and imagining that, somehow, there is someone inside. He closes with the image of still being kids in the basement, using a bit of make-believe to make the world less frightening and ourselves a little less alone.