On Monday’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart took on the most insidious force currently threatening our very survival as a species—and it’s got a fuzzy butthole. Yes, Stewart spent his requisite first ten minutes or so dissecting tech gurus’ sky-high promises and suspiciously vague details when it comes to AI’s potential. As Stewart played montages of the heads of AI companies like Meta, Anthropic, and NVIDIA freely predicting the end of poverty, disease, and human drudgery interspersed with their less eloquent stammering about just what’s going to happen to human jobs or the human species in general, the host worked up his signature head of righteous comic steam.
On Donald Trump’s recent conference with AI leaders, where he decided the solution for a purported10 to 25 percent chance of humanity’s AI-caused destruction was to let the tech overlords regulate themselves, Stewart was unconvinced. “Why can’t we just fucking slow this down rather than let people regulate something they have a clear conflict of interesting regulating?” Stewart asked, only for a slideshow of Republican talking heads to essentially scream, “Look out, China!” in response. (Ted Cruz’s opinion, “If there are going to be killer robots, I’d rather they be American killer robots,” elicited Stewart’s helpful suggestion, “No killer robots?”)
But even as Stewart seemed to be tightening his rhetorical snare around the “let us do whatever we want and you get free money… sometime” philosophy pitched by the Zuckerbergs, Altmans, and Musks of the new tech oligarchy, Big Tech sent in their top man. Or thing. It definitely looked, as Stewart posited, “like a panda fucked a Labubu,” anyway.
Yes, Muse has come to town, and it’s brought its rosy cheeks, squeaky voice, and scientifically engineered cuteness to disarm all but the heartiest AI critics. (Technically the cuddly new avatar for Meta’s Muse AI agent is named Jolly, just for added adorableness.) With a high, ingratiating voice sounding suspiciously like Stewart’s, the CGI spokes-thing pranced and danced and rather disconcertingly waggled its “widdle poo-poo” as it waved away all of the irate Stewart’s objections to it somehow knowing about the time the young Jon skipped school to he could pleasure himself to the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders on The Merv Griffin Show.
Sure, Muse/Jolly wants your power of attorney, but that’s only to make your life easier. It is definitely not part of the unrestricted, runaway surveillance state currently assisting in an ethnic cleansing campaign of non-white people from the United States—just look at it dance! With Stewart unimpressed (albeit a bit unnerved by the whole Merv thing), the cutesy intruder finally dropped its act, its voice suddenly sounding suspiciously like Jon Stewart on the set of Goodfellas, and warned, “We can do this the nice way with the round tummy and the cute little butthole, or we can do this the hard way where we infiltrate your water systems and launch missiles and—also show you my butthole.”
Either way it goes, as Stewart concluded, it’s us puny humans who will be getting it where the sun don’t shine, with AI’s genetically engineered avatar of adorable doom reminding us how we handed over our agency as a species just so writing emails would go a little easier.
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