{"id":205108,"date":"2025-12-26T15:06:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-26T15:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/205108\/"},"modified":"2025-12-26T15:06:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-26T15:06:08","slug":"why-the-sparkly-star-became-the-symbol-for-artificial-intelligence-and-why-thats-a-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/205108\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the sparkly star became the symbol for artificial intelligence\u2014and why that\u2019s a problem."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

As 2025 ends, two things are clearly true about generative A.I. in America. One, tons of people are using it. Two, most people don\u2019t like it. Led by ChatGPT, the No. 1 app in the App Store this year, more than a billion people<\/a> are using one of a handful of generative A.I. platforms every week. Use of these products at work is on a sharp upswing, Gallup has found<\/a>. But a series of Pew surveys reveals that Americans collectively are more worried than excited<\/a>, joining most of our fellow global citizens<\/a>. Americans also think A.I. is untrustworthy as a tool. According to a YouGov poll<\/a>, 68 percent of Americans wouldn\u2019t let an A.I. act on their behalf without maintaining approval over each action.<\/p>\n

Lately, I\u2019ve been returning to a bespoke theory about this A.I. malaise. It\u2019s not that our tech barons are appearing on panels and delivering over-the-top proclamations about its usefulness. (I\u2019m not even convinced it\u2019s the obscenely misleading advertising<\/a>, though that doesn\u2019t help.) It\u2019s not the uncomfortable reality that our retirement accounts now depend on a load-bearing Nvidia stock to remain moonbound forever. No, I think it\u2019s something different: the clickable icons that signify an A.I. feature and get certain ideas into our heads about A.I.\u2019s benefits and potential. I am talking about the little four-pointed stars, misshapen diamonds, or \u201csparkle-looking things\u201d (my term) that tech companies are using as shorthand to tell users that the thing they\u2019re about to click on is a generative A.I. tool.<\/p>\n

Variations of this four-pointed star\u2014I\u2019m going to call it a sparkle from here on out\u2014have become part of countless technologies in the past few years. Google designers may have been the ones to initiate this trend; they started using the sparkle for A.I. products in roughly the mid-2010s<\/a>, before ChatGPT kicked off an industrywide arms race. The sparkle is now part of Gemini\u2019s logo, and it also appears in various logos or buttons in a million other A.I. products. It has a minimal presence in ChatGPT but occasionally shows up when the user wants the machine to rework text. It\u2019s all over the place in Adobe\u2019s suite, including on the logo of Firefly, the creative giant\u2019s stand-alone generative A.I. app. In Zoom, it\u2019s part of the button that brings up the AI Companion, a notetaker.<\/p>\n

Why are we so underwhelmed by A.I.? I don\u2019t think it\u2019s because Sam Altman\u2019s or Satya Nadella\u2019s grandiose statements haven\u2019t matched their products\u2019 use cases. No, I think it\u2019s because of the goddamned buttons.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe sparkle has a metaphorical meaning that suggests magic,\u201d Heather Turner, an associate chair and professor in the department of English at Santa Clara University, where she teaches about user experience and accessible product design, told me. \u201cIn myth and folklore, magic is not always positive. It\u2019s used to teach lessons. So when companies choose this metaphor, they\u2019re shaping how users view the product and how developers think about the technology.\u201d<\/p>\n

Few in tech would dispute this implication. (In Canva, the sparkle even appears on a button for a \u201cMagic Media\u201d feature, which brings up a generative text-to-image tool.) Nik Kale, a principal engineer and product engineer for Cisco A.I. tools, explained to me the design principle: \u201cThe icon should indicate that it\u2019s that superintelligence, that automation, that insight, that magic, to use your word. The metaphor is familiar, right?\u201d Indeed it is. I place myself on the skeptical end of the A.I. spectrum and have tried to highlight adversarial commentary on the industry<\/a>. But my little human brain is only so strong, and I still think of magical powers whenever I see Gemini\u2019s logo. It\u2019s friendly magic, the sort that lets you ride around on a broomstick instead of the kind that splits your soul into a bunch of little pieces.<\/p>\n

Turner is an academic whose concern lies with user experience and the way A.I. will affect society. Kale is a tech decisionmaker whom I didn\u2019t find, by any means, to be ignorant of A.I.\u2019s many downsides. But it was striking that both of them acknowledged, from different vantage points, how this vague sense of magic is supposed to juice our use of A.I. products. The sparkle is gentle, a little ethereal, feeling not quite of this world. And it\u2019s ambiguous enough to apply to a gamut of A.I. tools, whether they\u2019re writing someone\u2019s essay, making up a fake revenge-porn picture, or serving as a targeted search engine. Come and see what\u2019s behind this door, the icon says.<\/p>\n

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\n Laurie Clarke
\n It\u2019s One of the Hardest Confrontations Anyone Can Have. It Might Be One Good Use of a Controversial Technology.
\n Read More\n <\/p>\n

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\u201cNot every experience should be pleasurable. Sometimes we need friction, safety warnings,\u201d Turner said. Those disclosures aren\u2019t part of typical work with generative A.I. Imagine Adobe blaring a big warning box that says, \u201cDon\u2019t use this for political misinformation.\u201d The sparkle implies heavenly powers but not the type that a person might misuse.<\/p>\n

I asked Turner: If she were back at the beginning of the generative A.I. boom and had the power to dictate the industry\u2019s UX moves, what would she use as the signifier of A.I.? She rummaged around for a second and suggested a triangle with an exclamation point in it, which would signal a bit of excitement but clear danger too. That plane, however, wouldn\u2019t fly for obvious reasons. \u201cSomeone has a design principle. They have to then advocate to the business folks, to the market folks, and it\u2019s kind of like design by committee,\u201d she said. \u201cYou\u2019re trying to design, let\u2019s say, a horse, and you end up with a zebra.\u201d And so we\u2019ve gotten the friendly, magical sparkle and its variants.<\/p>\n

Yet the sparkle hasn\u2019t quite won the war to become the definitive, lasting symbol of A.I. Getting users to make the association has been trickier than I\u2019d figured. As recently as September 2024, something like 17 percent of people thought that a sparkle icon signified favoriting or saving an item, according to research from the Nielsen Norman Group<\/a>, which does UX research and consulting. (The apparent problem there: The sparkle looks a lot like a star, which 73 percent of people associate with fave-ing or saving a piece of content.) Perhaps in the long run, something like the many A.I. company logos that look a bit like human buttholes<\/a> will carry the day. (I suspect that the logo designers would say they look more like a series of objects revolving around someone\u2019s life, but then again, I\u2019m not an artist.)<\/p>\n

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Tech Companies Love Using This Tiny Symbol. It\u2019s More Insidious Than You Think.
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But the sparkle has real momentum. The longer it\u2019s part of huge tech companies\u2019 A.I. products, the more entrenched the association will become. \u201cThere\u2019s a convergence where industry is collectively moving towards defining how A.I. looks and feels inside of user interfaces,\u201d Kale said. \u201cSo I think that\u2019s happening as we speak, but it\u2019s going to take time for it to get into people\u2019s minds.\u201d Already, if you search for \u201cAI\u201d on the Noun Project, a massive icon repository, you\u2019ll see mostly variations of the sparkle up top<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The bullish case for the sparkle is that it will become to A.I. what those four curved bars in the shape of a baseball field became to wireless internet. In the case of Wi-Fi, the design iconography became not just a symbol but the shorthand unit of measurement for something (internet strength) that has an actual metric, megabytes per second, behind it. That sort of measurement with generative A.I. is more binary: Either these products work or they don\u2019t. The genius of the sparkle is that even if they don\u2019t, can you ever really rule out a transformative future when the button you\u2019re about to click could summon literal magic?<\/p>\n

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