Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? (2025)
velvetshark.com
velvetshark.com
Naomi Klein in her book No Logo interprets it as a form of abstraction away from the passé and less profitable business of whatever concrete task those industries used to do, and towards outsourcing, branding, and financialization as an end in itself.
However, that all happens at the embryonic stage (around day 9). At the point where the embryo has advanced sufficiently to be called a fetus (around week 9), the body has already sufficiently developed so that it's impossible to say where "fetal development" starts: https://embryology.med.unsw.edu.au/embryology/index.php?titl...
Typo; should be day 17/18.
Millions of species are just tubes
I think this is peak millennialism because the design is supposed to be as inoffensive as possible and therefore shows absolutely nothing.
1. They have to be square. That immediately eliminates basically all logos that are just the companies name and forces everyone to adopt some sort of symbol.
2. They have to have solid backgrounds and rounded corners.
3. They are supposed to match Apple's theme, whatever it is this year. In practice this means simple solid geometries and not anything too fancy or detailed.
4. They have to be recognizable at a wide range of sizes, including very small.
5. If you want your logo to appear in a notification bar then the rules get even harsher. A tiny square, no detail, and it has to make sense in black and white. Note that the ChatGPT app puts such an icon into the macOS menu bar, so a logo that didn't work in black and white and at tiny sizes would be a problem for them.
When you combine these constraints what you're left with is variants shapes that fill the area inside a square, but which are not themselves square as iOS icons are actually "squircles", which can work in colour or black and white, and which can be recognizable at small sizes. So that's what you get.
The only way out of this boring-ass Sahara Desert of visuals would be for Apple and Google to redesign their operating systems in such a way that icons no longer mattered as much, or could be non-square shaped.
Yes because the spokes are the lines that go to the center
> Camera [apertures]?
100% - they even "wink"
> Does every circle in the world look like an asshole?
Well every asshole is circular and every person has an asshole so we are biased toward seeing them everywhere. Any prominently placed circle will always trigger an evolutionary reaction. Do I:
A) Sniff it
B) Hump it
C) Bite it
D) Vibe code slop with it?
Why do you think so many squares work in tech? It's because they don't hire assholes (circles)
The logos do look too canonically similar in general, though. :(
GPT is kinda Celtic
None of the Chinese labs have this buttholeness
The lines don’t actually work. Like they asked their bot to make a solomons knot style logo and it flubbed it.
But apparently it was good enough for purpose.
One man's trash...
I don’t see the gradient, their logo is black and white. Where’s the gradient? Was this written by an AI hallucinating?
“…but that’s really all a butthole is, an aperture” - Louis CK
We do what we must because we can For the good of all of us, except the ones who are dead
The mental model of the superintelligence, to a true believer, is much more like a thing that consumes our world (hopefully for the better) rather than a thing that exists within the world and "produces stuff" in it.
to see it if you aren't logged in to x
> right angles introduce the precision and structure that technology demands
Ironic missing space right there...
Of course this is a uniquely american problem. The world uses android
Kudos to DeepSeek and Midjourney for doing something different.
In the past year(s) I have noticed a few icons in my Android phone turning into the same thing.
For a long time there was Uber, white on black. And then others thought white on black was the cool thing to join in on, making the reduced icons of the following look the same : Uber, Soundcloud (they kept their sigil at least), Swile, Qobuz, myNoise. I'm sure if I installed more junk I'd have seen more.
Even myNoise who goes against tech grain! To their credit, they added an orange circle background to it sometime this spring. Soundcloud execs woke up and went back to their trademark orange. But, heck.
But now I can't unsee it.
IIRC, circular maNDalas as per Jung draw your attention towards its center, which is the most important part of the maNDala. For Jung, the circular maNDala represented the self - the totality of the psyche - with the center representing its organizing principle. I've noticed how this pattern naturally arises in circular flowers, with the petals serving to draw the bee in to the center where the reproductive structures and nectar are located.
I realize that I am not really helping matters much, but thought would mention this anyway.
But again, if someone is looking for assholes, they will find them.
The new logo: basically identical to Claude's current one but blue. The new name: Spark. Conveys: absolutely nothing, the blank slate business, our executives don't actually know what we do.
This is my experience as well, people drawn to leadership in our present time often have absolutely no idea about anything except the -idea- of business. Which of course makes things vaguely "professional" seeming while they effectively destroy businesses/organisations.
[1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/casual/programmers-sell-ox-not...
"A man and a woman making love in a park," the man replies.
The psychiatrist holds up the second picture and asks the man what he sees.
"A man and a woman making love in a boat."
He holds up the third picture.
"A man and a woman making love at the beach."
This goes on for the rest of the set of pictures; the man says he sees a man and a woman making love in every one of the pictures. At the end of the test, the psychiatrist looks over his notes and says, "It looks like you have a preoccupation with sex."
And the man replies, "Well, you're the one with the dirty pictures."
What did AI say when you asked it? I got a slightly funny but reassuring answer.
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45506 [1] https://inkbotdesign.com/circle-logos/
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43649640
Black Sun, Saturn (hexagon in OpenAI logo, anyone?), saturnalias and all the ensuing and tangential cults. The ouroboric cult of Singularity, etc.
The clergy beyond those AI corporations uses those symbols to express the intent for power, total control and surveillance.
The amount of esoteric obsession of those who print and own money to feed the AI beast, is staggering.
To each according to his wits.
The knowledge that can never be caught into a fixed form. The Mercury of alchemists.
The paradox of "war is peace", "slavery is freedom" and the like, and both the promise to solve it (by striving to close the gap between Ouroboros' mouth and tail), and eternal damnation of the elusive drift of all meanings in its unresolved state.
A certain 3rd entity around which the duality of the visible world evolves and revolves, remaining out of its scope, which is better expressed by the Caduceus.
Also, the attempt to conceal that invisible third hermetically, which always fails without failing, fractally and recursively generating all the spectrum of meanings from this single underlying paradox, the resolution of which was sought after by alchemists in the form of Lapis Philosophorum.
I could go on and on, but this can only be experienced, not expressed.
Slop rhymes with plop.
Dead bird on road? Better lick it, not to miss its cloaka!