This week was an exciting one for the AI community, as Apple joined Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and others within the long-running competition to seek out an icon that even remotely suggests AI to users. And like everyone else, Apple has punted.
Apple Intelligence is represented by a circular shape made up of seven loops. Or is it a circle with a lopsided infinity symbol inside? No, that’s Latest Siri, powered by Apple Intelligence. Or is Latest Siri when your phone glows around the sides? Yes.
The thing is, nobody knows what AI looks like, and even what it’s alleged to appear like. It does every part but looks like nothing. Yet it must be represented in user interfaces so people know they’re interacting with a machine learning model and not only plain old searching, submitting, or whatever else.
Although approaches differ to branding this purportedly all-seeing, all-knowing, all-doing intelligence, they’ve coalesced around the concept that the avatar of AI needs to be non-threatening, abstract, but relatively easy and non-anthropomorphic. (They appear to have rejected my suggestion that these models all the time speak in rhyme.)
Early AI icons were sometimes little robots, wizard hats or magic wands: novelties. However the implication of the primary is certainly one of inhumanity, rigidity and limitation — robots don’t know things, they aren’t personal to you, they perform predefined, automated tasks. And magic wands and the like suggest irrational invention, the inexplicable, the mysterious — perhaps fantastic for a picture generator or creative sounding board, but not for the sort of factual, reliable answers these firms want you to consider AI provides.
Corporate logo design is mostly a wierd concoction of strong vision, industrial necessity and compromise-by-committee. And you possibly can see these influences at work within the logos pictured here.
The strongest vision goes, for higher or worse, to OpenAI’s black dot. A chilly, featureless hole that you just throw your query into, it’s a bit like a wishing well or Echo’s cave.
Biggest committee energy goes, unsurprisingly, to Microsoft, whose Copilot logo is effectively indescribable.
But notice how 4 of the six (five of seven in the event you count Apple twice, and why shouldn’t we) use nice candy colours: colours that mean nothing but are cheery and approachable, leaning toward the female (as such things are considered in design language) and even the childlike. Soft gradients into pink, purple and turquoise; pastels, not hard colours; 4 are soft, never-ending shapes; Perplexity and Google have sharp edges, but the previous suggests an countless book while the latter is a comfortable, symmetrical star with welcoming concavities. Some also animate in use, creating the impression of life and responsivity (and draw the attention, so you possibly can’t ignore it — taking a look at you, Meta).
Overall, the impression intended is certainly one of friendliness, openness and undefined potential — versus facets like, for instance, expertise, efficiency, decisiveness or creativity.
Think I’m overanalyzing? What number of pages do you’re thinking that the design treatment documents ran for every of those logos — over or under 20 pages? My money can be on the previous. Firms obsess over these items. (Yet one way or the other miss a hate symbol dead center, or create an inexplicably sexual vibe.)
The purpose, nonetheless, will not be that corporate design teams do what they do, but that nobody has managed to hit on a visible concept that unambiguously says “AI” to the user. At best these colourful shapes communicate a negative concept: that this interface is not email, not a search engine, not a note app.
Email logos often figure as an envelope because they’re (obviously) piece of email, each conceptually and practically. A more general “send” icon for messages is pointed, sometimes divided, like a paper plane, indicating a document in motion. Settings use a gear or wrench, suggesting tinkering with an engine or machine. These concepts apply across languages and (to some extent) generations.
Not every icon can allude so clearly to its corresponding function. How does one indicate “download,” for example, when the word differs between cultures? In France, one telécharges, which is sensible but isn’t really “download.” Yet we’ve arrived at a downward-pointing arrow, sometimes touching down on a surface. Load down. Same with cloud computing — we adopted the cloud despite it being, essentially, a marketing term for “a giant datacenter somewhere.” But what was the choice, a tiny datacenter button?
AI continues to be latest to consumers who’re being asked to make use of it rather than “other things,” a highly general category that purveyors of AI products are loath to define, since to achieve this would imply that there are some things AI can do and a few it may’t. They are usually not able to admit this: The entire fiction is dependent upon AI having the ability to do anything in theory, it being but a matter of engineering and compute to realize it.
In other words, to paraphrase Steinbeck: Every AI considers itself as a temporarily embarrassed AGI. (Or I should say, is taken into account by its marketing department, since AI itself, as pattern generator, considers nothing.)
Within the meantime, these firms must still call it by a reputation and provides it a “face” — though it’s telling, and refreshing, that nobody actually selected a face. But even here they’re on the whim of consumers, who ignore GPT version numbers as an oddity, preferring to say ChatGPT; who can’t make the reference to “Bard” but acquiesce to the focus-tested “Gemini”; who never desired to Bing things (and positively not seek advice from the thing) but don’t mind having a Copilot.
Apple, for its part, has taken the shotgun approach: You ask Siri to question Apple Intelligence (two different logos), which occurs inside your Private Cloud Compute (unrelated to iCloud), or even perhaps forward your request to ChatGPT (no logo permitted), and your best clue that an AI is listening to what you’re saying is … swirling colours, somewhere or in every single place on the screen.
Until AI is itself a bit higher defined, we will expect icons and logos representing it to proceed to be vague, unthreatening, abstract shapes. A colourful, ever-shifting blob wouldn’t take your job, would it not?
