Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?
velvetshark.com
velvetshark.com
You can see a sun with a house, and you can see a butt with an object penetrating.
But admittedly, it's pretty hard to unsee the butt once you think about it.
Surely some people knew right away the moment the logo came out of the designer's office.
> ...
> No single person suggests making a logo that resembles an anus, but when everyone's feedback gets incorporated, that's what often emerges. Risk aversion in corporate environments naturally pushes designs toward familiar, "safe" territory, which apparently means anatomical openings.
There's hope! If you're a stakeholder in a logo design meeting, be sure point out the circular proposals look like anuses.
Also I hate all those "bold, sans-seif" logos. What they hell are they thinking? Those companies should just all change their name to "Company," too.
...let's not pretend there isn't a serious point here about the depressing sameness in modern design
To specifically pick on their examples of bad "Big AI company" logos, and how many already "embrace meaningful abstraction":
1. Gemini is a twinkling star, and it's just not a circle at all. Using curves isn't copying other people that use curves, that's one of two ways to draw a line!
2. OpenAI isn't just "corporate euphemism", it's three interlinking chain links. I'd say that's some pretty cool abstraction, personally!
3. Meta AI's logo (?) is obviously trash, so fair enough.
4. Grok is a black hole, which is invoking the metaphor of the Vinge's Technological Singularity (i.e. the point at which an intelligence explosion leads to unforeseeable outcomes, likened to how the center of a black hole is somewhat unforeseeable in current physics).
5. Perplexity's logo is an abstraction of the pages of a book -- the designers actually have a nice blog post here: https://medium.com/smith-diction/branding-perplexity-ai-70eb...
6. "Apple Intelligence" isn't a real product and is definitely copying OpenAI's "interlocking shapes" metaphor, but I'd also say it's more triangular than circular when you really look at it. To its small credit, it definitely seems built with animation in mind.
7. Finally, Anthropic was founded by OpenAI engineers worried about existential risk, and the logo reflects that -- AFAIK, it's depicting an intelligence explosion. The parallel to Vonnegut has been noted before and is funny for a moment, but IMO "asterisks are banned" isn't a design principle to take at all seriously because of that one joke.
Remember, the alternative to this "butthole" phenomenon is a much, much darker world, one that's already in place for smaller companies: a world where every logo is a slightly-stylized brain!
I agree with most of it, but I also don't see why all blog posts have to be serious. I had fun researching and writing it, and I don't pretend it's a scientific masterpiece.
(from lobste.rs)
Assuming the technological singularity is always trying to gain more information and quicker than it did the previous clock cycle, I would think it would both expand out to grasp new information as well as make what it has more dense.
Information presumably takes up some space and has some mass. Ever increasing the amount of it and confining it in a smaller and smaller volume of space would I think lead to a gravitational singularity.