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Comment by cpldcpu | Hacker News Reader

Not a big fan of emojis becoming the norm in LLM output.

It seems Grok 4.1 uses more emojis than 4.

Also GPT5.1 thinking is now using emojis, even in math reasoning. 5 didn't do that.

I personally don’t like it intertwined with conversation, but I do think I like how it adds color to help emphasize certain information, outside of the text. A red X or a green checkmark is easier to see at the start than a sentence saying something is valid halfway through a paragraph.

Also, it using emojis helps as a signal that certain content is LLM generated, which is beneficial in its own right.

Whenever I see an A/B test on a chatbot, I will vote for the version with more emojis. It might be petty, but it's all the rebellion I've got left.

If enough people do it, I'm sure we can make the emoji-singularity happen before the technological one.

:checkmark: Added some words

:checkmark: Hashed passwords (with MD5)

:checkmark: Added <basic feature>

Your code is now production-ready! :rocket:

I swear I'm losing my mind when Claude does this.

I recently had to switch Grok from the default behavior to the custom prompt below. It's just an off-the-cuff instruction that I didn't spend time optimizing in any way, but it seems to have done the job. In hindsight, that probably coincided with silent A/B testing of 4.1.

> Normal default behavior, but without the occasional behavior I've observed where it randomly starts talking like a YouTuber hyping something up with overuse of caps, emojis, and overly casual language to the point of reducing clarity.

Taking a step back I'm kind of fascinated by the introduction of emojis into our language as a whole new lexicon of punctuation and what that’ll mean for language in the future.

…but I’m still infuriated when I read a passage full of them.

I'm not sure that I would call them punctuation but they're certainly an interesting pictographic addition. I think they're great, but I too get irritated when not used judiciously.

To me, their usage is akin to to turning a plaintext file into rtf. Emojis do not look the same across platforms. Generated text should default to the generic IMO.

Ok. :green-checkmark:

Plain text doesn't look the same across platforms for the same reason emojis don't, what's your point? At a technical level, it's no different than a plaintext doc with Chinese (or almost any other non-latin script) characters in it. It's still just a linear stream of text encoding with no specific structure beyond that.

There's a reason they were a Japanese language invention because the idea of "symbols = meaning" is not something that would have likely natively happened in English, at least to a wide extent. We would have still been writing :-)

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