Meet Plum Plum (WIP)
Character Design (2025)
PlumPlum is an AI agent who never pretends to be human. He's a baby alien (made in a lab, rendered in sparkly data-driven goop) with plastic googly eyes that move at random. A character study in honest anthropomorphism.
The design decisions are deliberate. His googly eyes scan constantly because he wants to see as much data as he can, but he doesn't understand what he sees, not really. He recognises patterns; he doesn't comprehend them. He uses he/him pronouns because the data he was trained on skews heavily male. But really, he's not a person at all. We just find it easier to talk to him that way.
Three Character Types
Plum Plum is part of a framework for talking about AI: a cast of characters that represent three fundamentally different kinds of computing.
Plum Plum characters represent AI agents. Alien, probabilistic, capable of producing output that looks like understanding, without having genuine cognition. Not human, not mechanical. Something genuinely new and powerful, but with problematic roots in profit-driven, US-based corporations.
Earthlings are closer to anthropomorphic figures: avatars of real people. They have bodies, sensory experience, cultural context, and relationships, things an AI can only approximate from the outside, working from a digital profile that flattens everything that makes a person whole. They exist to provide critical distance from the synthetic Plum Plums.
Devices are purely procedural. They do exactly what they're told, every time. Deterministic, predictable, no surprises. The characters exist to enable understanding algorithms and automations under human control, positioned as distinct from black-box AI systems.
Together, the three types help name something important: AI is not a smarter calculator, and it's not a digital person. It sits in genuinely new territory, with its own capabilities, risks and social impacts that are worth understanding clearly.
Design studies across all three character types are ongoing. Variations and iterations are part of the process. The full world (origin stories, illustrated environments, visual language) is being built out at plumplum.land.
An ongoing design project. Growing alongside Plum Plum Land.
If you have a project that could use Plum Plum for something good, get in touch.
