It's been an exciting week for the AI community, as Apple has joined companies like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and others in a long-running competition to find an icon that gives users a glimpse of AI. And like other companies, Apple has been pushed back.
Apple Intelligence is represented by a circle with seven loops. Or is it a circle with an uneven infinity symbol inside? No, it's the new Siri with Apple Intelligence. Or is it the new Siri with the glow around the edge of your phone? Yes.
The problem is that no one knows what AI is, or even what it looks like. It does everything and looks like nothing. But AI needs to be represented in the user interface so that users know they're interacting with a machine learning model, not just searching, submitting, or some other action.
Approaches to branding this supposedly all-seeing, all-knowing, all-doing intelligence vary, but they all converge on the idea that AI avatars should be non-threatening and abstract, but relatively simple and non-anthropomorphic (they appear to have rejected my suggestion that these models always speak in rhymes).
Early symbols of AI were novelties: little robots, wizard hats, magic wands. But the former connote impersonality, rigidity, and limitations. Robots are ignorant, impersonal, and perform predefined automated tasks. The latter conjure up images of irrational invention, the inexplicable, and the mysterious. That may be good for image generators and creative consultants, but not for the factual, reliable answers these companies want us to believe AI provides.
Corporate logo design is typically a strange mix of strong vision, commercial necessity, and compromises made by committee, and the logos featured here show these influences.
For better or worse, the most powerful vision is found in OpenAI's Black Dot: a cold, featureless hole into which you throw your queries, a bit like a wishing well or Echo's cave.
Image credit: OpenAI/Microsoft
The committee's greatest energy has predictably been focused on Microsoft, whose Copilot logo is virtually inexplicable.
But notice that four of the six (five of seven if you count Apple twice, why not?) use pleasing candy colors. These colors tend to be bright, friendly, feminine (as the design language would deem them) or childish, without any sense of it. Soft gradients to pink, purple, and turquoise. Pastel colors, not hard colors. Four are soft, open-ended shapes. Perplexity and Google have sharp edges, but the former is reminiscent of a never-ending book, the latter a happy, symmetrical star with a welcome concave surface. Some come to life during use, giving the impression of life and responsiveness (and catching the eye, so hard to ignore; I'm looking at you, Meta).
Overall, the intended impression is one of approachability, openness and undefined possibility, as opposed to, for example, aspects such as expertise, efficiency, decisiveness and creativity.
Am I over-analyzing this? How many pages do you think each of these logos' design process documents were? More than 20 pages, or less? I'd guess the former. Companies obsess over these things (but somehow they make the hate symbol out of the middle or inexplicably sexualize it).
But the point isn't what the corporate design teams are doing, it's that no one has come up with a visual concept that clearly communicates to the user that this is an “AI.” At best, these colorful shapes communicate the negative concept that this interface is not an email, search engine, or note-taking app.
The email logo is often depicted as an envelope, since conceptually and practically it is (obviously) an email. The common “send” icon for a message is pointed, sometimes split, like a paper airplane, suggesting a document in motion. Settings include gears and wrenches, suggesting tinkering with an engine or machine. These concepts apply across languages and (to some extent) generations.
Not all icons can so clearly imply their corresponding function. For example, how do we indicate “download” when the word varies from culture to culture? In France, we pronounce it “télécharges,” which makes sense but isn't actually “download.” But we end up with a downward arrow, sometimes touching the surface. Load down. Same with cloud computing. We went with the cloud, even though it's essentially a marketing term that means “a big data center somewhere.” But would we have had a little data center button instead?
AI is still new to consumers, and they want to use it instead of “other things.” It's a very general category that purveyors of AI products don't want to define, because that would mean there are things AI can do and things it can't. They refuse to acknowledge this. This whole fiction is based on the premise that AI can do anything in theory, and it's just a matter of engineering and computing to make it happen.
In other words, to paraphrase Steinbeck, all AI considers itself a temporarily bemused AGI (or perhaps we should say it is considered by its marketing department, since the AI as a pattern generator considers nothing of itself).
Meanwhile, these companies still have to be called by name and given a “face.” It's suggestive and refreshing that no one has actually chosen the face. But even here they are subject to the whims of consumers, who ignore the GPT version number as odd and prefer to say ChatGPT; don't understand the connection to “Bard” but are convinced by the focus-tested “Gemini”; don't want to search for it on Bing (and certainly don't want to talk to it) but don't mind having Copilot.
Apple, on the other hand, takes a shotgun approach: You can ask Siri to query Apple Intelligence (two different logos), which runs within its private cloud computing (no relation to iCloud), or it can forward your request to ChatGPT (no logos allowed).The best clue that the AI is listening to you is the swirling colors anywhere or anywhere on the screen.
Until AI itself is a bit more clearly defined, icons and logos representing it are likely to remain vague, non-threatening abstract shapes. Colorful, ever-changing blobs aren't going to take over your job, right?