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 search 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, 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 presupposed to seem like. It does all the pieces 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 one in every 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 high quality for a picture generator or creative sounding board, but not for the type of factual, reliable answers these firms want you to consider AI provides.
Corporate logo design is mostly an odd concoction of strong vision, business 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 should 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 limitless book while the latter is a pleased, 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 one in every of friendliness, openness and undefined potential — versus features like, for instance, expertise, efficiency, decisiveness or creativity.
Think I’m overanalyzing? What number of pages do you think that the design treatment documents ran for every of those logos — over or under 20 pages? My money can be on the previous. Corporations obsess over this stuff. (Yet by some means 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 email, a search engine, a note app.
Email logos often figure as an envelope because they’re (obviously) email correspondence, 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,” as an illustration, when the word differs between cultures? In France, one telécharges, which is sensible but isn’t really “download.” Yet we now have 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 “an enormous datacenter somewhere.” But what was the choice, a tiny datacenter button?
AI continues to be recent to consumers who’re being asked to make use of it instead of “other things,” a highly general category that purveyors of AI products are loath to define, since to accomplish that would imply that there are some things AI can do and a few it could possibly’t. They are usually not able to admit this: The entire fiction depends upon AI with 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 consult with 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 maybe even 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 all places on the screen.
Until AI is itself a bit higher defined, we are able to 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?
