If you’ve been paying attention to AI-related announcements over the past year, you’ve probably noticed that many tech companies have chosen stars or star-like symbols to represent their AI products and services, and at Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked event today, the sparkly logo was everywhere.
This story is part of the Samsung Event, CNET’s roundup of news, tips and advice about Samsung’s most popular products.
And we need tech companies to stop it. Now.
The sparkly emoji is special. It’s not the boring basic star (⭐) your grandma sends you. It’s not the emoji (💫) that’s supposed to represent dizzyness, it’s the emoji most often used by HR professionals to tell you you’re a shooting star. This sparkly star (🌟) gets an honorable mention for being quirky and daring, but none of them can compare to ✨Her✨.
The sparkly emoji is versatile and has many meanings. It’s used for emphasis, to add a bit of flair and personality to a message. It shows you’re a fun person and don’t take yourself too seriously. It’s mostly used sarcastic, and is a more fun emoji version of ~tilde~. In my opinion, ✨ is just for girls! (Notting Hill reference and meme, not a gendered concept – people of all genders can and should use ✨).
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Screenshot/James Martin/CNET
Samsung finally showed off its latest Galaxy Ring and announced the latest generation of its Galaxy foldable smartphones, the Galaxy Watch Ultra and Galaxy Buds, at its Unpacked event today, and it may have thought stars would make a good visual statement. As we all know, there are stars in the galaxy. Google’s Gemini AI also uses a star icon, so it wouldn’t be surprising if Apple sprinkles stars on the rainbow-colored Apple Intelligence coming with iOS 18.
But beyond the literal interpretation, we can’t help but speculate that tech companies are intentionally branding their AI with sparkles and stars. Maybe they think they can put stars in our eyes to distract us from AI’s more pernicious consequences, like privacy concerns, environmental impacts, and potential job losses. Or maybe it’s because stars seem far away, bright, and mysterious. This is what AI companies want while obscuring the inner workings of their chatbots and companies. The sparkles symbolize the magic of the new technology without forcing us to ask deep questions.
Well, I refuse to ignore those meanings, and I demand that these tech companies ditch the stars and glitter icon in the meantime. It’s not theirs.
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