This week has been an exciting one for the AI community, as Apple has 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 launched.
Apple Intelligence is represented by a circular shape made up of seven loops. Or is it a circle with an unbalanced infinity symbol inside? No, it’s New Siri, powered by Apple Intelligence. Or is New Siri when your phone glows around the edges? Yes.
The fact is that no one knows what AI looks like, or even what it’s supposed to look like. It does everything but looks like nothing. Still, it needs to be represented in user interfaces so people know they are interacting with a machine learning model and not just with a simple search, submit or whatever.
Although approaches differ to qualify this intelligence that is supposed to see everything, know everything and do everything, they are grouped 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.)
The first icons of AI were sometimes small robots, wizard hats or magic wands: new things. But the first implication is inhuman, rigid and limited: robots know nothing, they are not personal to you, they perform predefined and automated tasks. And magic wands and the like suggest irrational invention, the inexplicable, the mysterious – perhaps good for an image generator or a creative sounding board, but not for the kind of factual, reliable answers these companies want from you make believe that AI provides.
Designing a business logo is usually a strange concoction of strong vision, business necessity, and compromise by committee. And you can see these influences at work in the logos pictured here.
The strongest view goes, for better or worse, to OpenAI’s black spot. A cold, featureless hole that you throw your request into is a bit like a wishing well or Echo’s Cave.
The committee’s greatest energy goes, unsurprisingly, to Microsoft, whose Copilot logo is effectively indescribable.
But notice how four of the six (five out of seven if you count Apple twice, and why not us) use pleasant candy colors: colors that don’t mean anything but are cheerful and approachable, leaning toward the feminine (like such things are considered in design language) or even childish. 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 cheerful, symmetrical star with welcoming concavities. Some also come alive when in use, creating a sense 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, competence, efficiency, decisiveness or creativity.
Do you think I’m overanalyzing? How many pages do you think the design processing documents contained for each of these logos – more or less than 20 pages? My money would be on the former. Businesses are obsessed with these things. (Yet you somehow miss a hate symbol blind spot or create an inexplicably sexual vibe.)
The problem, however, is not that corporate design teams do what they do, but that no one has managed to come up with a visual concept that unambiguously says “AI” to the user. At best, these colored shapes communicate a negative concept: that this interface is not E-mail, not search engine, not a notes application.
Email logos often appear as an envelope because it is (obviously) email, both conceptually and practically. A more general “send” icon for messages is pointed, sometimes split, like a paper airplane, indicating a moving document. The settings use a gear or wrench, suggesting tinkering with a motor or machine. These concepts apply to all languages and (to some extent) all generations.
Not all icons can so clearly allude to the corresponding function. How do you say “download,” for example, when the word differs across cultures? In France, we download, which is logical but it’s not really “downloading”. Yet, we came to an arrow pointing downward, occasionally landing on a surface. Load down. It’s the same with cloud computing: we’ve embraced the cloud even though it’s essentially a marketing term for “a big data center somewhere.” But what was the alternative, a little data center button?
AI is still new to consumers who are being asked to use it in place of “other things,” a very general category that AI product providers are loath to define because it would imply that there is There are some things AI can do and others it can’t. They are not ready to admit it: the whole fiction depends on the ability of AI to do anything in theory, which is just a matter of engineering and calculation to achieve it.
In other words, to paraphrase Steinbeck: each AI sees itself as a temporarily embarrassed AGI. (Or should I say, is taken into account by its marketing department, since the AI itself, as a model generator, takes nothing into account.)
In the meantime, these companies have yet to call it a name and give it a “face” – although it’s telling and refreshing that no one has actually chosen a face. But even here, they are at the whim of consumers, who ignore GPT version numbers as a quirk, preferring to talk about ChatGPT; who cannot make the connection with “Bard” but acquiesces to the “Gemini” who was the subject of concentration tests; who never wanted to send things to Bing (and certainly not talk to the thing) but I don’t mind having a co-pilot.
Apple, for its part, has taken the shotgun approach: you ask Siri to query Apple Intelligence (two different logos), which happens in your Private Cloud Compute (unrelated to iCloud), or perhaps even be able to send your request to ChatGPT (no logo allowed). ), and your best clue that an AI is listening to what you say is… swirling colors, somewhere or everywhere on the screen.
Until AI itself is a little better defined, we can expect the icons and logos representing it to continue to be vague, unthreatening, abstract shapes. A colorful, ever-changing blob wouldn’t take your job, would it?