Sparkles emoji

It is the third most-used emoji in the world on Twitter as of 2021, and since the early 2020s it has been used by major software companies to represent artificial intelligence.

According to Emojipedia, the Sparkles emoji was first used by Japanese mobile operators SoftBank, Docomo and au in the late 1990s.

Companies who use the emoji this way include Google, OpenAI, Samsung, Microsoft, Adobe, Spotify and Zoom.

[8] Another explanation given by designers and marketers choosing to use Sparkles to signify AI is simply that everyone else is doing it, making it familiar to users.

[6] In early 2024 the Nielsen Norman Group provided test subjects with the star in isolation and found that people did not associate the symbol with AI, but instead mostly with "optimisation" or "favourite or save an item".