This week has been an exciting one for the AI ​​community, as Apple joins 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 made a bet.
Apple Intelligence is represented by a circular shape composed of seven loops. Or is it a circle with a curved infinity symbol inside? No, it’s the New Siri, powered up by Apple Intelligence. Or is the 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 should look like. It does everything but looks like nothing. Still, it needs to be represented in user interfaces so people know they’re interacting with a machine learning model and not just plain old search, submit, or whatever.
Although approaches to labeling this supposedly all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-doing intelligence differ, they have coalesced around the idea that an 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 artificial intelligence were sometimes small robots, wizard hats or magic wands: novelties. However, the consequence of the former is inhumanity, rigidity and limitation – robots do not know things, they are not personal to you, they perform pre-defined, automated tasks. And magic wands and the like suggest an irrational invention, inexplicable, mysterious – maybe good for an image generator or a creative sounding board, but not for the kind of factual and reliable answers these companies want you to believe AI provides.
Corporate logo design is generally a strange mix of strong vision, commercial necessity and compromise by committee. And you can see these influences in the logos pictured here.
The strongest vision goes, for better or worse, to OpenAI’s black dot. The cold, featureless hole you drop your query into is a bit like a wishing well or Echo Cave.
The biggest energy in the committee belongs, unsurprisingly, to Microsoft, whose Copilot logo is practically indescribable.
But notice how four out of six (five out of seven if you count Apple twice, and why shouldn’t we) use pleasant candy colors: colors that don’t mean anything but are cheerful and approachable, leaning towards the feminine (how do such things consider a design language) or even childish. Soft transitions to pink, purple and turquoise; pastels, not hard colors; four are soft, never-ending shapes; Confusion and Google have sharp edges, but the former suggests an endless book, while the latter is a happy, symmetrical star with pleasant concavities. Some also animate when used, creating a sense of life and responsiveness (and drawing the eye so you can’t ignore it – looking at you, Meta).
Overall, the intended impression is one of friendliness, openness, and undefined potential—as opposed to aspects such as expertise, efficiency, decisiveness, or creativity.
Do you think I’m overanalyzing? How many pages do you think the design development documents were for each of these logos – more than 20 pages or less? My money would be on the former. Companies are obsessed with these things. (However, it somehow lacks the dead space of a hate symbol or creates an inexplicably sexual vibe.)
But it’s not that corporate design teams are doing what they’re doing, it’s 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 concept: that this interface is No by email, No search engine, No note taking app.
Email logos often feature envelopes because they are (obviously) email, both conceptually and practically. The more general “send” icon for messages is a pointed, sometimes split, paper plane that indicates a document in motion. The settings use a gear or a key, indicating that you will be playing with the engine or machine. These concepts apply across languages ​​and (to some extent) generations.
Not every icon can refer so clearly to its corresponding function. For example, how do you refer to “downloading” when the word varies between cultures? In France they make phone calls, which makes sense, but it’s not really “downloading”. Still, we arrive at a downward arrow that sometimes touches the surface. Load down. Same with cloud computing – we’ve embraced the cloud even though it’s basically a marketing term for “a big data center somewhere”. But what was the alternative, the little data center button?
AI is still new to consumers who are being asked to use it instead of “other things”, a very general category that AI product vendors don’t like to define because that would imply that there are things that AI can do and some it is not possible. They’re not ready to admit it: The whole fiction depends on AI being able to theoretically do anything, it’s just a matter of engineering and computation to make it happen.
In other words, to paraphrase Steinbeck: Every AI sees itself as a temporarily shamed AGI. (Or should I say, it is considered by its marketing department, because the AI ​​itself does not consider anything as a pattern generator.)
In the meantime, these companies still have to call it and put a “face” on it—though it’s telling and refreshing that no one actually picked a face. But even here they are at the whim of consumers who ignore GPT version numbers as an oddity and prefer to say ChatGPT; who cannot connect with the “Bard” but reconcile with the proven “Gemini”; who never wanted Bing stuff (much less talk to stuff) but don’t mind having Copilot.
Apple, for its part, has taken a shotgun approach: You ask Siri to query the Apple Intelligence (two different logos) that resides in your Private Cloud Compute (not related to iCloud), or maybe even forward your request to ChatGPT (no logo allowed) . ), and your best clue that the AI ​​is listening to what you’re saying is … swirling colors, somewhere or everywhere on the screen.
Until AI itself is a little better defined, we can expect the icons and logos that represent it to continue to be vague, non-threatening, abstract shapes. A colorful, constantly scrolling blob wouldn’t take your job, would it?