This week was an exciting one for the AI community, as Apple joined Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and others in the long-running competition to find an icon that even remotely suggests AI to users. And like everyone else, Apple has turned a corner.
Apple Intelligence is represented by a circular shape consisting of seven loops. Or is it a circle with a slanted infinity symbol inside? No, this is New Siri, is fed by Apple Intelligence. Or is it New Siri when your phone glows around the edges? Yes.
The thing is, no one knows what artificial intelligence looks like, or even what it’s supposed to look like. It does everything but looks like nothing. However, it needs to be represented in user interfaces so that people know they are interacting with a machine learning model and not just plain old search, submit or whatever.
Although approaches differ on the branding of this supposed all-seeing, all-knowing, all-doing intelligence, they have converged around the idea that the AI avatar should be non-threatening, abstract, but relatively simple and non-anthropomorphic. (They seem to have rejected my suggestion that these models always speak in rhyme.)
Early AI icons were sometimes little robots, wizard hats or magic wands: innovations. But the implication of the former is inhumanity, rigidity, and limitation — robots don’t know things, they’re not personal to you, they perform predetermined, automated tasks. And magic wands and the like suggest absurd invention, the inexplicable, the mysterious—maybe good for an image generator or a creative sounding board, but not for the kind of real, reliable answers these companies want you to believe artificiality provides. intelligence.
Corporate logo design is generally a curious synthesis of strong vision, commercial necessity and compromise by committee. And you can see those influences in the logos pictured here.
The strongest vision goes, for better or worse, to OpenAI’s black dot. A cold, featureless hole into which you drop your question is a bit like a wishing well or Echo’s cave.
The committee’s biggest energy goes, unsurprisingly, to Microsoft, whose Copilot logo is essentially nondescript.
But notice how four out of six (five out of seven if you count Apple twice, and why not) use pleasant candy colors: colors that mean nothing but are cheerful and approachable, leaning towards the feminine (as these are considered design language ) or even the child’s. Soft gradients in pink, purple and turquoise. pastels, not hard colors. Four are soft, endless shapes. Perplexity and Google have sharp edges, but the former suggests an endless book while the latter is a happy, symmetrical star with welcoming hollows. Some also come to life in use, creating the impression of life and responsiveness (and eye-catching, so you can’t ignore it – looking at you, Meta).
Overall, the desired impression is one of friendliness, openness, and undefined potential — as opposed to aspects such as, for example, expertise, efficiency, determination, or creativity.
Do you think I’m overanalyzing? How many pages do you think the design development documents ran for each of these logos — over or under 20 pages? My money would go to the former. Companies are obsessed with these things. (Yet you somehow lose a hate symbol in dead center or create an inexplicably sexual atmosphere.)
The point, however, is not that corporate design teams are doing what they’re doing, but that no one has managed to hit on a visual concept that clearly says “AI” to the user. At best, these colorful shapes communicate a negative idea: that this interface is not E-MAIL, not a search engine, not a notes app.
Email logos often appear as a folder because they are (obviously) email, both conceptually and practically. A more general “send” icon for messages is sharp, sometimes split, like a paper plane, indicating a document in motion. Settings use a gear or a key, indicating motor or machine processing. These concepts apply across languages and (to some extent) across generations.
Not every icon can refer so clearly to its respective function. How does one pronounce “take”, for example, when the word differs between cultures? In France, a telecharge, which makes sense but isn’t really a ‘download’. However, we have arrived at a downward pointing arrow that sometimes touches down on a surface. Load down. Same with cloud computing — we adopted the cloud even though it’s essentially a marketing term for “a big data center somewhere.” But what was the alternative, a tiny data center button?
AI is still new to consumers who are asked to use it instead of “other things,” a very general category that AI product vendors can’t define because that would mean there are certain things AI can do. artificial intelligence and some cannot. They’re not ready to admit it: The whole fiction depends on AI being able to do anything in theory, it’s just a matter of engineering and calculation to achieve it.
In other words, to paraphrase Steinbeck: Every AI thinks of itself as a temporarily disgraced AGI. (Or should I say, assumed by the marketing department, since AI itself, as a pattern generator, assumes nothing.)
Meanwhile, these companies need to call it a name and give it a “face” — though it’s telling, and refreshing, that no one actually chose a face. But even here it’s at the whim of consumers, who ignore GPT version numbers as strange, preferring to say ChatGPT instead. who cannot make the connection with ‘Bard’ but consents to the focused ‘Gemini’. who never wanted to do Bing stuff (and certainly doesn’t talk about it), but he doesn’t mind having a Copilot.
Apple, for its part, took the shotgun approach: You ask Siri to ask Apple Intelligence (two different logos), which appears in Private Cloud Compute (not related to iCloud), or maybe even forward your request to ChatGPT ( no logo allowed ), and the best indication that an AI is listening to what you’re saying is … swirling colors somewhere or everywhere on the screen.
Until AI is a bit better defined, we can expect that the icons and logos that represent it will continue to be vague, non-threatening, abstract shapes. A colorful, ever-changing blob wouldn’t get you the job, would it?
