1. The cartoon
Meta has given its new AI a mascot. A cuddly cartoon — soft edges, big friendly eyes, the whole kit — rolled out with the practiced warmth of a company that has decided you and your family should feel good about letting it further into your life.
So let’s talk about what cuddly cartoons are for. Because this is not a new move. It is one of the oldest and dirtiest moves in American marketing, and it has a history, and the history is not subtle.
2. We have a name for this
His name was Joe Camel.
From 1988 to 1997, R.J. Reynolds put a smooth, cartoon camel in sunglasses on the front of Camel cigarettes. In 1991 the Journal of the American Medical Association published the studies that ended him: six-year-olds recognized Joe Camel about as readily as they recognized the Disney Channel logo — better than nine in ten of them. High-schoolers knew him better than adults did. Camel’s share of the under-eighteen cigarette market climbed. The Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint for “unfair practices” — for using a cartoon to walk children toward a product that would kill a predictable fraction of them. In 1997, under the lawsuits and the pressure, R.J. Reynolds quietly retired him, in disgrace.
He was not alone. Spuds MacKenzie, the “party animal,” sold Bud Light to anyone young enough to want a dog in sunglasses. The Marlboro Man sold Marlboros, and several of the men who played him died of the thing they were selling. The cartoon, the mascot, the friendly face bolted to the front of a product that harms you — especially aimed at hooking you while you are young and your defenses are not yet built — is a known tactic with a known purpose. It is the single most studied piece of predatory marketing in the last fifty years.
3. What the mascot is for
The person who has spent a decade naming this move is Tristan Harris — a former Google design ethicist who trained as a magician and now runs the Center for Humane Technology. His argument is that these products are engineered, deliberately, to exploit the blind spots and vulnerabilities of human perception — to steer what people do without their ever noticing the hand on the wheel. He has a name for the cumulative damage: human downgrading — the addiction, distraction, and dependency manufactured as the byproduct of capturing attention. The magician’s trick and the mascot’s are the same trick: lower the guard, own the frame, and the mark never feels managed.
A mascot is that trick aimed at the youngest, softest targets. Make the thing feel safe and simple and fun — an emotional anchor of warmth and ease — so a child’s guard, and a parent’s along with it, comes down. That is how you secure the next generation of demand: not a product bought once, but a dependency formed early and billed forever — now denominated in compute instead of cartons. It is the Joe Camel move, ported to artificial intelligence.
4. Who is doing it
And here is the part that makes it not merely cynical but obscene: who is running this play.
This is the company whose own internal research — made public by Frances Haugen in 2021 — found that its products worsened body image and mental health for teenage girls, and which chose to downplay it. This is the company that more than forty state attorneys general sued in 2023, alleging it knowingly designed addictive features that harm children. This is the company that has spent a decade being shown, in its own documents, what it does to the young — and has, again and again, decided that this was not its problem.
That company is now putting a cuddly cartoon on its AI and inviting it into your home.
Of course it is. Of course they would. The people who studied how to hold your children’s attention, who optimized for it, who knew the cost and shipped it anyway — of course they would reach for the mascot. It is completely, perfectly on brand.
5. The Marlboro of tech
That is what Meta is. Not a company that occasionally does harm. A company whose business model is the harm, dressed up friendly — the Marlboro of tech, reaching for the Joe Camel of AI because it has always, always been this kind of company and it is not going to become another kind now.
You don’t have to let the cartoon in. There is a version of a personal AI that doesn’t need a mascot, because it isn’t hiding anything — one you own, that answers to you, that keeps nothing from you and sells nothing of you. But that is another essay. This one is just to make sure that the next time you see the friendly little face, you see Joe Camel. Because that is exactly, precisely, what it is.