Why the sparkle emoji became the symbol of AI

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Benjamin Errett is the author of Elements of Wit: Mastering the Art of Being Interesting and writes a weekly newsletter at getwitquick.com.

When you think back on 2024, you don’t think: Sparkles! But this was the year that little golden starbursts truly became the icon of AI, the technology that’s changing the world faster than our fleshy brains can comprehend it. Google, Microsoft, Spotify, Samsung, Slack, LinkedIn, ChatGPT: All use a variation on the concave four-pointed star to signal features powered by artificial intelligence.

Why sparkles, though?

It seemed like the robot had it in the bag. If we were going to have a simple, universally recognizable symbol for artificial intelligence, the robot emoji was the obvious choice. Sure, experts tell us that the technology that’s been integrated into every part of the economy in the past year – sometimes usefully, more often not – doesn’t actually look like the maid from The Jetsons. But the underlying concept is commonly referred to as machine learning, so what better icon than a machine, learning?

But that solution was the problem. Just about every sentient robot in popular culture, starting with the Czech automaton that gave us the word “robot,” has gone chips up. If they’re like the androids in the Alien movies, they consistently deliver us to planets full of bloodthirsty xenomorphs. If they’re like the bots in philosopher Nick Bostrom’s paperclip-apocalypse thought experiment – in which an AI assigned to make paperclips finds novel ways to turn everything into a paperclip, as well as ways to stop humans from turning it off – they drown the universe in little silver trombones. Either way, we lose.

So how did the marketers of AI fix this? Magic! Or more specifically, the cluster of three stars that is the sparkle emoji. If you’re editing a video, typing an e-mail, looking for a playlist, trying to make sense of a spreadsheet or just aiming to get something done quicker on your computer, this was the year that you could click on the sparkle emoji to get some instantaneous assistance.

If you didn’t know this, you’re safely in the majority. The Nielsen Norman Group, a digital design consultancy, diagnosed the phenomenon of “sparkle ambiguity” earlier this year. When 106 people were shown the four-cornered star, not a single one thought “artificial intelligence”; the most popular answers were “optimization options” (arguably AI without the baggage) or “favourite or save an item” (understandable confusion with the old-fashioned five-pointed star). And indeed, both Lyft and Starbucks use the sparkles in their apps to indicate a special deal, one presumably so good that retailers required supernatural forces just to offer it to you.

Naturally, Arthur C. Clarke saw all this coming. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey famously declared. (And anyone who owned a Kobo circa 2010 knows this, not because the e-reader was particularly magical but because that quotation featured prominently on the lock screen.) Clarke’s Law holds, but so does Stirling’s Corollary: Any sufficiently advanced garbage is indistinguishable from magic.

Bruce Sterling is a science-fiction author who, with William Gibson, helped create the cyberpunk genre. His corollary is in reference to the 1972 classic Soviet novel Roadside Picnic, in which aliens have visited our planet, looked around, and left, leaving only their trash behind. Humans spend their time sifting through this garbage, looking for gems, not unlike what Michael Keaton’s Vulture character did in the last good Spider-Man movie. Amusingly, the authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (or rather their translator Olena Bormashenko) describe the otherworldly junk as sparkling. “It’s not even sparkling in an unusual way, just a tiny bit, mildly and almost gently,” they write. It’s sufficiently advanced garbage.

And 2024 was filled with very advanced garbage! It’s hard for human intelligence to comprehend how the people behind the dominant search engine owned by one of the richest corporations that has ever existed opted to tell users that mixing non-toxic glue into pizza sauce would keep the cheese from sliding off. Or that you should ingest rocks to get your recommended daily dosage of minerals. The answer is of course capitalism; as one analyst told the New York Times: “Companies need to move really fast, even if that includes skipping a few steps along the way.” And even if the result is akin to pulling a dead rabbit out of a hat.

Before the Age of AI – which we can roughly date to the launch of ChatGPT 3 in September, 2022, when this theoretical technology suddenly seemed like a great way to fill the internet with slop – the sparkle emoji had its own very specific uses. Gretchen McCulloch, the foremost expert on Internet English, traces it back to 2010, when people started using the ~, or tilde symbol, to express “sparkle enthusiasm.” Her analysis was that one might be sooooooo excited about something, and intone the many ohs of soooooo in a tilde wave-like cadence. In 2015, she notes, a BuzzFeed article explained that using sparkle enthusiasm was “somewhere between sarcasm and a sort of mild and self-deprecatory embarrassment over the usage of a word or phrase.” As in, you like it, suspect you shouldn’t, but can’t be bothered to suppress your enjoyment – but still want to signal that mild turmoil in a simple way.

Which is perhaps why the sparkle is the perfect symbol for what we’re calling AI in the year 2024. It’s astounding in certain situations but regularly disappoints in others. It’s never been so easy to create dreck in a world already up to its eyeballs in it. It will clearly remake the entire process of creation in ways we can’t imagine – to wit, the large amounts of energy it takes to tell you to eat rocks are requiring Google and Microsoft to pour billions into nuclear power. And maybe that energy sparkles, too: Sarcastically, astonishingly, like trash and like the future.