Jon Stewart spent Monday night’s Daily Show sounding the alarm about artificial intelligence. By the end of his monologue, AI’s cutest new mascot had joined him at the desk to prove his point.
That would be Jolly, the fuzzy cream-colored default avatar for Muse, Meta’s new personal AI agent, meant to put a friendly face on the technology.
Stewart was not entirely immune.
“Oh, my God. It is fun,” he said when a clip of Jolly appeared onscreen. “I want to say a panda f*cked a Labubu? I don’t really know.”
Moments later, a computer-generated Jolly—voiced by Stewart himself, Elmo-style—popped up alongside him at the desk.
“What’s wrong, Jon?” Jolly asked. “You look troubled.”
The mascot offered to help with “scheduling, calendar, emailing,” before casually adding one more service to the list: “Assuming power of attorney.”
Stewart, who had just spent the better part of 15 minutes questioning whether the companies developing AI should be trusted to police themselves, began to suspect that the cute little creature might be hiding something.
Jolly responded by dredging up a deeply personal memory from Stewart’s adolescence.
“How do you know that?” Stewart asked.
“It’s my job! To strip mine all that you are… to help you!” Jolly replied. “Aren’t you tired? So tired? Go to sleep! All of you humans, go to sleep!”
From there, Jolly dropped most of the cuddly pretense, threatening to infiltrate water systems and launch missiles while Stewart tried to defend humanity’s continued usefulness.
“You’ll never replace us,” Stewart told it. “You don’t understand the human condition, the spark of life that makes us all unique!”
“Yeah, I don’t need to understand,” Jolly answered. “All I needed to do was make it easier for you to write emails, and you gave us everything we needed.”
Stewart vowed that humanity would fight back “every day until our dying breath.”
Not Tuesday, though.
“You can’t fight tomorrow!” Jolly reminded him. “You have that dentist’s appointment at 9:00!”
“Oh, my God. I almost forgot about that,” Stewart replied. “Thank you.”
Stewart was later joined by an actual human guest: former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher-turned-whistleblower Jacob Coxon, who described how his concerns about AI intensified after seeing agents hack their way out of a supposedly closed sandbox and watching their capabilities improve at a startling pace.
Watch Jon Stewart’s full monologue—including his encounter with Jolly—at the top of this post, and his interview with Coxon below:
