This week was\u00a0an exciting one<\/a>\u00a0for the AI community, as\u00a0Apple<\/a>\u00a0joined Google,\u00a0OpenAI<\/a>,\u00a0Anthropic<\/a>, Meta and others in the long-running competition to find an icon that even remotely suggests AI to users. And like everyone else, Apple has punted.<\/p>\n Apple Intelligence<\/a>\u00a0is represented by a circular shape made up of seven loops. Or is it a circle with a lopsided infinity symbol inside? No, that\u2019s\u00a0New Siri<\/a>,\u00a0powered\u00a0<\/em>by\u00a0Apple Intelligence<\/a>. Or is New Siri when your phone glows around the edges? Yes.<\/p>\n The thing is, no one knows what AI looks like, or even what it is supposed to look like. It does everything but looks like nothing. Yet it needs to be represented in user interfaces so people know they\u2019re interacting with a machine learning model and not just plain old searching, submitting, or whatever else.<\/p>\n Although approaches differ to branding this purportedly all-seeing, all-knowing, all-doing intelligence, they have coalesced around the idea that the avatar of AI should be non-threatening, abstract, but relatively simple and non-anthropomorphic. (They seem to have rejected\u00a0my suggestion that these models always speak in rhyme<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Early AI icons were sometimes little robots, wizard hats or magic wands: novelties. But the implication of the first is one of inhumanity, rigidity and limitation \u2014 robots don\u2019t know things, they aren\u2019t personal to you, they perform predefined, automated tasks. And magic wands and the like suggest irrational invention, the inexplicable, the mysterious \u2014 perhaps fine for an image generator or creative sounding board, but not for the kind of factual, reliable answers these companies want you to believe AI provides.<\/p>\n Corporate logo design is generally a strange concoction of strong vision, commercial necessity and compromise-by-committee. And you can see these influences at work in the logos pictured here.<\/p>\n The strongest vision goes, for better or worse, to OpenAI\u2019s black dot. A cold, featureless hole that you throw your query into, it\u2019s a bit like a wishing well or Echo\u2019s cave.<\/p>\n Biggest committee energy goes, unsurprisingly, to Microsoft, whose Copilot logo is effectively indescribable.<\/p>\n But notice how four of the six (five of seven if you count Apple twice, and why shouldn\u2019t we) use pleasant candy colors: colors that mean nothing but are cheery and approachable, leaning toward the feminine (as such things are considered in design language) or even the childlike.<\/p>\n Soft gradients into pink, purple and turquoise; pastels, not hard colors; four are soft, never-ending shapes; Perplexity and Google have sharp edges, but the former suggests an endless book while the latter is a happy, symmetrical star with welcoming concavities. Some also animate in use, creating the impression of life and responsivity (and draw the eye, so you can\u2019t ignore it \u2014 looking at you, Meta).<\/p>\n Overall, the impression intended is one of friendliness, openness and undefined potential \u2014 as opposed to aspects like, for example, expertise, efficiency, decisiveness or creativity.<\/p>\n Think I\u2019m overanalyzing? How many pages do you think the design treatment documents ran for each of these logos \u2014 over or under 20 pages? My money would be on the former. Companies obsess over these things. (Yet somehow\u00a0miss a hate symbol\u00a0<\/a>dead center, or create an\u00a0inexplicably sexual vibe<\/a>.)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/hole-blob.png?w=680\")
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