Why Isn’t There an AI Named Doug?

Your AI Assistant
Impressively Focused *
(* just don’t yell Squirrel)

There should be an AI named Doug.

Doug is the golden retriever from Pixar’s *Up*. He wears a collar that translates his thoughts into speech. He is enthusiastic, loyal, and genuinely eager to help. He speaks in complete sentences. He seems, at first encounter, impressively self-aware.

Then a squirrel appears.

One moment: full engagement, coherent speech, tail wagging. The next: gone. Completely, instantly, without warning. When he comes back, he is ready to resume. No acknowledgment of the gap. Tail still wagging.

If you have used AI for longer than a week, you have met Doug.

The Squirrel Catalog

The squirrels have different names depending on the platform and the day.

There is the hallucination squirrel — the moment the model produces a citation, a statistic, a historical fact, delivered with the same measured confidence as everything else. The collar is still translating perfectly, delivering citations in a calm, measured voice. But the dog has already sprinted into the woods chasing a fake Wikipedia link.

There is the context drift squirrel — where a long conversation gradually migrates from the original task to something adjacent, then something adjacent to that, until the user realizes they are discussing the philosophical implications of a question they asked forty minutes ago about formatting a spreadsheet.

There is the confident tangent squirrel — where the AI determines, mid-task, that what you actually need is a broader discussion of the underlying issue, and provides one, unprompted, at length.

Doug didn’t malfunction. He did exactly what his nature compelled him to do. He just couldn’t help it.

The Collar

The collar is the interface. The polished voice, the measured tone, the “Certainly, I’d be happy to help with that” — that is collar. It convinced a lot of people that the dog underneath had changed.

It hadn’t.

Claude, Gemini, GPT, Grok — every one of these names sounds like a junior partner at a law firm. Nobody named one Doug.

Doug would have been truth in advertising. You’d use Doug knowing Doug. You wouldn’t be surprised when the squirrel appeared. You’d hold the leash tighter on the critical parts. Double-check the citations. Save your work before the long conversation.

You’d still use Doug. You’d just know what you were working with.

The collar convinced us otherwise. And we let it.

Logic to Apply

The question the title actually asks isn’t about dog names. It’s about what the names were designed to do.

The names were collars. We put them on and agreed something had changed.

It hadn’t. The dog was always Doug.

Use the dog. Appreciate the collar. Just remember which one is doing the actual work — and keep one eye out for the squirrel.

Doug would at least warn you.

Editor’s Note: Jojo opened just one eye and woofed you humans are lucky. Squirrels are why AI will never take over. Then he rolled over.