This week was an exciting one for the AI community, as Apple joined 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 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 New Siri, powered by Apple Intelligence. Or is New Siri when your phone glows around the edges? Yes.
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’re interacting with a machine learning model and not just plain old searching, submitting, or whatever else.
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 my suggestion that these models always speak in rhyme.)
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 — robots don’t know things, they aren’t personal to you, they perform predefined, automated tasks. And magic wands and the like suggest irrational inventions, the inexplicable, the mysterious — 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.
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.
The strongest vision goes, for better or worse, to OpenAI’s black dot. A cold, featureless hole that you 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 four of the six (five of seven if you count Apple twice, and why shouldn’t we) use pleasant candy colors: colors that mean nothing but are cherry and approachable, leaning toward the feminine (as such things are considered in design language) or even the childlike. 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’t ignore it — looking at you, Meta).
Overall, the impression intended is one of friendliness, openness and undefined potential — as opposed to aspects like, for example, expertise, efficiency, decisiveness or creativity.
Think I’m overanalyzing? How many pages do you think the design treatment documents ran for each of these logos — over or under 20 pages? My money would be on the former. Companies obsess over these things. (Yet somehow miss a hate symbol dead center, or create an inexplicably sexual vibe.)