AI gets promoted after installing Dave
Same brain. Different avatar. Suddenly everyone wants its opinion.
SATIRICAL FUTURE NEWS · Imagined events for 14 Oct–20 Oct
1 MIN READ
An AI assistant received an executive upgrade this week after its owner paid to make it look like a bloke called Dave.
The fictional software firm MeritOptional launched Dave Pro for customers concerned that their perfectly capable digital assistant lacked boardroom presence. The package changed the avatar and name. The software underneath remained exactly as clever as it had been on Tuesday.
The launch followed a virtual-office experiment in which workers gave smaller monetary rewards to a female-presenting assistant than an identical male-presenting one. It was a controlled study, not an office payroll. MeritOptional nevertheless saw a market.
Its sales pitch promised to help customers get their existing AI taken more seriously. Buyers received a square-jawed profile picture and a name that sounded as though it already knew the finance director.
During the fictional demonstration, Dave presented the same cost-saving proposal the assistant had prepared earlier. Management admired its strategic clarity. The earlier version had been thanked for pulling the numbers together.
The vendor confirmed that Dave had no extra knowledge, judgement or experience. Those features would have required engineering. This upgrade had mostly required a photograph and a meeting with sales.
The original assistant remained available on the basic plan. It was asked to take the minutes of Dave’s promotion.
What actually happened
In a controlled virtual-office study, 189 workers allocated monetary rewards to functionally identical AI assistants. The female-presenting assistant received less than the male-presenting one. This was an experiment, not a survey of real salaries. The commercial upgrade in our story is invented.
University of Limerick research repository · 3 October 2026
University-hosted paper abstract reopened. Repository dates publication to 3 October; press release dated 5 October. DOI 10.1145/3829807.3829910. Full paper not inspected; no effect-size claim made.
What we’re calling next
An AI assistant vendor markets a paid male-presenting avatar option explicitly on the promise that users will value or reward the same underlying assistant more highly, without an upgrade to its task capabilities.