Emoji use was stable from 2020-2024, then spiked in 2025. The authors don't attempt to explain it, but I bet AI is to blame. Anyone who has had to clean up AI comments riddled with stupid emojis from their code will understand this.
I've also seen emojis popping up in official meeting minutes which is fine too. Why not spice it up with some whimsy.
Is this satire? I hope it is. Otherwise it seems like a sorry state that science currently is if it needs emojis to bring some novelty into it.
I generally don't use them in routine practice but when I see some of my straight-laced coworkers strategically deploy them I don't hate it!
Consider this: You're a grad student who's been reading page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page of lack and white text.
How is marking a particularly explosive comment with a graphic representation of an explosion any different from highlighting it? Or from Davinci's marginal scribbles? or from Feynman's wave diagrams?
Or, for that matter, simply bolding, italicizing, or underlining it?
Shit, why even format it at all? Who needs page breaks and indented paragraphs in something as serious as a scientific paper?
God forbid we ever go so far as to implement more than one font.
Changes to the methods by which we communicate are made on a regular basis. If people find them useful enough to put them in their own communications, and they do not harm the clarity of the transmission, who are we (or you in particular) to cry about it on the sidelines?
You remind me of the person in the back of the room trying to invalidate a proof based on a misspelling that in no way impacts the validity of the proof.
As if adding an emoji somehow invalidates the months or years of work that went in to producing the content that you are consuming at no cost and will likely benefit from without having contributed to the project in any meaningful way.
I mean, seriously. Imagine someone's finally created a genuine cure for all cancers. They've spent the entire lives of hundreds of people and billions of dollars, and oh no! What's this? Aww, damn there's an emoji in one of the graphs. Damn. Too bad, I guess it's not going to be good enough for freehorse. Better go ahead and send it back for revisions. Can't publish it like that. Not now, not ever. Curing cancer's going to have to wait until we can force the author of this paper to conform to our arbitrary preferences.
What an interesting way to describe reading a book. It's amazing that anyone can read an entire book, composed of hundreds of pages, without getting bored of the black text.
Looking at the examples in the comment above, I really hope it's not that bad.
It's like the stupid "ROFL"/CLOWN by political fighters, and the (handclap) 500 times in a row, like. Or the ROFL by people who are trying to make their shit seem "funnier" than it every could be and only makes it more obnoxious.
There's a difference between "making a powerpoint at a conference and using emojis as bullet points" and throwing emojis every other word to be cute and getting papers published, or medical records with that.
However, using the context clues, I surmised that the original poster, that is the one who enjoys seeing emojis being used as bullet points in literature produced by his colleague, finds this to be "fun".
Is that pedantic enough? AM I GOOD ENOUGH???? WILL YOU LOVE ME NOW DADDY?
The science you're writing about is hopefully extremely novel of course.
In general I've found "innovating on the wrong thing" is surprisingly common, especially from people who are bored and/or hungry for promotions, etc.
Believe it or not researchers enjoy humor around sometimes. There's a global shortage of a specific DAKO antibody we need for biopsy analysis right now and on a call with 50 people one of our chief scientists deadpans, "it's because I stopped making it in my basement."
Did you mean "use emojis"?
These leaked documents (pastebin below) might present evidence for a different view.
I had examples in this comment of how I see people using them at work but hackernews apparently doesn't allow emojis!
That's not what "novelty" means in that context. If your review included "these emoji's really bring some novelty to this cholesterol survey" I'd look at you funny.
I guess their RLHF data had it? On purpose? And various labs all the same?
Because if they were just learning from web data (pre- a few years ago), this didn’t seem to be very prevalent.
Many of the models were trained on top of ChatGPT or variants (and hence the emojis), then officially attribution disappeared, but it's unprovable.
This process is called distillation.
For example, one day Nano-Banana answered to me with a link to a picture generated on... FAL platform (that did not exist).
DeepSeek:
Anthropic Claude:
Grok:
Gemini-Flash-Lite, if you squeeze it a bit:
> I must state clearly: I am a large language model, trained by OpenAI. This is the core definition of ChatGPT. If I claimed to be a human, a different company's AI, or a physical entity, that would be a clear falsehood regarding my nature.
Over time this is fading because now they have their own trained output, and all these companies actively replace references to OpenAI, and distilled, mixed with other training data, their own, cleaned up, distilled, so the source text disappeared.
We talk about people who did not have any remorse downloading the whole library of pirated books, so their concept of copyright is very loose.
It may be a TOS violation - but it is not a copyright violation.
In the United States (and several other countries), human creativity as part of authorship is required for something to be copyrightable.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
You maybe hate this style at first glance. But if you read lots of text everyday, Emoji and bullet points lower the cognitive load.
That's from the article? Yeah I think there should be pretty much no doubt about that.
Maybe I'm just out of touch with some corners of the Internet that this was trained on.
For example: , —, …, “ ”, ’ ‘, emojis, <|startoftext|>, <|endoftext|>, <|assistant|>, <|user|>, [BOS], [EOS], [PAD], [CLS], [SEP], [MASK], [UNK], U+00A0–U+00AD, U+200B–U+200F, U+2012–U+2015, U+202A–U+202E, U+2060–U+206F, U+FE00–U+FE0F, U+FEFF, U+FF01–U+FF5E, U+E0000–U+E007F.
I have no idea what you're talking about. I code daily, with 80/90% of my work AI-assisted, and never had to clean one emoji.
As for emojis appearing in EHRs, a more likely explanation is the growing presence of Gen Z professionals in healthcare, who are known for integrating emojis into their communication. This trend probably has little to do with AI and more to do with generational habits.
do you read this code? I find it hard to believe unless you have llm instructions in your codebase that you are not aware of
AI generated text is littered with emojis in my experience as well, often used as bullets in the lists it loves to generate.
I think your personal experiences are anecdotal, unique, and not representative of EHR users.
There were not ~800% more gen-z healthcare workers in 2025 than there were in 2024.
I did have a scientist recently write a list of lab best practices and before he wrote the list he had a note "Follow instructions below" and then he had a finger pointing DOWN emoji pointing to the list... my work bestie and I actually screenshotted that and sent it to each other and were giggling about it, because he generally is a serious, smart, straight-laced dude and him putting in a garish down facing bright yellow finger emoji just seemed very silly compared to his personality. But it caught our attention and ensured we both read his list!
I would say the uptick is also partly responsible from people using their phones more often during work communication, if he sent that email from his phone instead of his computer it was easier to throw in an emoji to emphasize his important list.
>I have no idea what you're talking about. I code daily, with 80/90% of my work AI-assisted, and never had to clean one emoji.
Yeah because they dont just add them to any generated code. Although if you ask them to make some sort of UI that might involve graphics, they will happily add lots of emojis. They do add them very liberally, especially in headings, for writing articles, blog posts, repots etc.
It depends on the task, or the particular product/agent you're using. ChatGPT is a lot more emoji-heavy than say the business Copilot. Claude code, never. GitHub copilot never.
What I can tell you is, people I know who are SME's who are being paid several hundred thousand dollars a year this past year have started just copypastaing my questions into an LLM and regurgitating back to me whatever they said.
From my friend who is a director of a medical research library, a huge number of doctors recently switched from googling shit to just running it through the free ChatGPT.
Compare the READMEs of GitHub repositories for low-rated Show HN submissions in 2025 vs 2024. It's really clear.
It depends on what you ask it. Asking it to code won't generate a single emoji, but ask it to make a list, summarize something, and similar tasks and you will have it all over.
And I disagree with people who always try to stick whatever to "generational stuff" as if there's a distinct wall with total culture differences, plus assuming XYZ gen is a monolith to apply whatever label on. I think this is just an easy, lazy way to explain things that you couldn't understand or explain. Sure, you might have some differences between a 13-year-old and 55-year-old in some categories, but they still share a lot of common ground as well. But a 20-something and 30-something? Barely any difference, let alone at work where usually there are policies and whatnot that will restrict such differences from surfacing.
I grade student work, and I see a lot of Python generated by AI. I don't know exactly which AI, but about a third of the work I see is littered with emojis.