This week was an exciting for the AI community, as Apple joined Google, OPENAI,, AnthropicMeta and others in long -term competition to find an icon that even suggests the AI to users. And like everyone else, Apple kicked.
Apple Intelligence is represented by a circular shape made up of seven loops. Or is it a circle with an infinitely unbalanced symbol inside? No, it’s New Siri,, powerful by Apple Intelligence. Where is the new Siri when your phone shines on the edges? Yes.
The fact is that no one knows what AI looks like, or even what it is supposed to look like. He does everything but looks like nothing. However, it must be represented in user interfaces so that people know that they interact with an automatic learning model and not just an old research, submission or anything else.
Although the approaches differ from the brand of this allegedly understanding, omniscient and omnipresent intelligence, they have merged around the idea that the Avatar of AI should be non -threatening, abstract, but relatively simple and not anthropomorphic. (They seem to have rejected My suggestion that these models always speak rhyme.)
The first AI icons were sometimes small robots, sorcerer’s hats or magic baguettes: novelties. But the involvement of the first is that of inhumanity, rigidity and limitation – the robots do not know things, they are not personal for you, they perform predefined and automated tasks. And the magic and similar baguettes suggest an irrational invention, the inexplicable, the mysterious – perhaps very well for a generator of images or a Care of its creative, but not for the type of factual and reliable responses that these companies want you to believe that AI provides.
The design of the corporate logo 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 illustrated here.
The strongest vision goes, for better or for worse, to open the black point of Openai. A cold and without business in which you throw your request, it is a bit like a wisdom well or the Echo cave.
The greatest energy of the committee will, not surprisingly, to Microsoft, whose COPILOT logo is actually indescribable.
But notice how four of the six (five of the seven if you count twice with the apple, and why should we not) use pleasant candy colors: colors that mean nothing but are joyful and accessible, leaning towards the feminine (as these things are considered in the design language) or even the child.
Soft gradients in pink, purple and turquoise; pastels, no hard colors; Four are soft and endless forms; Perplexity and Google have lively edges, but the first suggests an endless book while the second is a happy and symmetrical star with welcoming concavities. Some also animate in use, creating the impression of life and responsiveness (and draw the eye, so you cannot ignore it – looking at you, meta).
Overall, the printing planned is that of conviviality, openness and unrefined potential – as opposed to aspects such as, for example, expertise, efficiency, determination or creativity.
Do you think I’m too analyzed? How many pages do you think that design processing documents have worked for each of these logos – on or less than 20 pages? My money would be on the first one. Companies are obsessed with these things. (However, in a way Make a symbol of hatred dead center, or create a inexplicably sexual atmosphere.)
The fact, however, is not that the corporate design teams do what they do, but that no one has managed to strike a visual concept that says unambiguously “IA” to the user. At best, these colorful forms communicate a negative concept: that this interface is not e-mail, not a search engine, not A note application.
E-mail logos often Figure like an envelope Because they are an email (obviously), both conceptually and practically. A more general “sending” icon for messages is sophisticated, sometimes divided, as a paper plan, indicating a moving document. The settings use equipment or a key, which suggests tinkering with an engine or machine. These concepts apply between languages and (to a certain extent) generations.
Not all icons cannot refer to its corresponding function so clearly. How do you say “download”, for example, when the word differs between cultures? In France, a download, which makes sense but is not really “downloading”. However, we arrived at an arrow pointing down, sometimes touching an area. Loading. Ditto with Cloud Computing – we adopted the Cloud despite its being, essentially, a marketing term for “a large data center somewhere”. But what was the alternative, a small data center button?
The AI is still new to consumers who are invited to use it in place of “other things”, a very general category that the providers of AI products are deemed to be defined, because this would imply that there are things that AI can do and others. They are not ready to admit it: all fiction depends on the possibility of doing anything in theory, this is only a question of engineering and calculation to achieve it.
In other words, to paraphrase Steinbeck: each AI considers itself a temporarily embarrassed act. (Or I must say that it is considered by its marketing service, since Himself, as a generator of patterns, does not consider anything.)
In the meantime, these companies must always call it by a name and give it a “face” – although it is revealing and refreshing, that no one has really chosen a face. But even here, they are according to consumers, who ignore the GPT version numbers as a quirk, preferring to say chatgpt; who cannot establish the link with “Bard” but acquiesce the “Gemini” tested at home; Who never wanted to bing (and certainly not talk to the thing) but don’t mind having a co -pilot.
Apple, for its part, adopted the approach of the shotgun: you ask Siri to ask for Apple’s intelligence (two different logos), which occurs in your private cloud calculation (unrelated to iCloud), or perhaps even Transfer your ChatPPT request (No authorized logo), and your best index that IA listens to what you say is … swirling colors, somewhere or everywhere on the screen.
Until the AI is a little better defined itself, we can expect the icons and the logos representing it to be vague, non-threatening and abstract. A colorful and constantly evolving blob would not take your job, right?