How AI Stole the ✨ Sparkles ✨ Emoji

I wonder if you’ve seen.. This.. ✨ a lot recently?

This is the Sparkles ✨ emoji. And over the years, It has been used for.. a lot of things. Magic. Fairy dust. Samsung decided to use it for.. Fireworks? One time?

Thanks for reading Futura! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

But more recently, since maybe around 2019 or 2020, I’ve been using it for.. Other things. I can’t even really tell you what. But a few years ago, I started to use it to add some flair. Sometimes it was as a sparky response. Sometimes it was just a vibe. And I can not tell you why.  I kinda just like it. I like the emoji. And maybe that’s the entire reason it's good, right? Because whatever I am trying to communicate with this ✨ can’t really be described with words.

Anyway, in 2021, the internet started using this emoji.. CONSTANTLY. This time, as a form of emphasis. Some irony maybe. But the popularity of this thing took off. So much so, that for a time, it took the spot of #3 most-used emoji in the world, according to scraped Twitter data. And it took that from Pleading Face Emoji, so clearly the world has been hot on this thing.

And that’s great. We are vibing. We are having fun. We like the emoji.

But then, in December 2023, something happened.

In 2023 AI became the thing. It wasn’t crypto, or the metaverse, or the Internet of Things or 3D TVs - It was AI. And it still is AI. But in late 2023, seemingly overnight, this emoji that I once used to add that 🌶️ spice 🌶️ — that the internet loved to use for DRAMA and humor and excitement. Suddenly, it was used to signify artificial intelligence.

Almost Every. Single. Feature. That’s shipped in the past year and a half has the sparkle emoji ✨ slapped onto it. Features that claim they’re AI powered. And ya know, maybe they are! Is it the new kind of AI that set off a chain reaction in this whole industry? Large language models? Transformer architectures? Stable Diffusion? Maybe! Sometimes! But also, sometimes it’s not!

Sometimes, it is just the same machine learning and automation computers have been doing for decades. And sometimes, I’m not even sure you could even consider some of this stuff AI at all.

But my point is.. why the sparkles?! Why did this exploding industry decide to bootstrap my favorite emoji as its unofficial mascot? I mean there are a lot of options!

So I started looking into this. At first, I was working backwards. Week by week. Month by month. Year by.. Year. Looking for the sparkles on different apps. And products. And features. Looking for some indication of why this industry decided to take this thing and use it themselves. And I found some early examples!

In 2020, Google Photos added the sparkle emoji as a button on an auto enhancement feature. And before that, in 2018, Twitter added an algorithmic timeline button to jump between news feeds. And before THAT, Google used a single sparkle in Google Sheets for its “explore feature, which to be honest, looks a hell of a lot like the “new”, “dazzling” AI enhanced features we’re seeing today.

But you know.. working backwards has its limits. You can Google for days. Months. And maybe you’ll find some of the first examples. But then you start finding more fringe things - like the fact that GE Healthcare was apparently using the sparkles emoji for an AI feature back in 2016!

So if I can’t figure out when, I guess the question I should be asking is.. Why. And why.. Well why requires context. So instead of working backwards, let's work forwards. Let’s go back before ChatGPT. Before Google Photos or Twitter. Let’s go back a little further. To when the Sparkles became an emoji in the first place.

Alright, so, every character we can display on our devices has to be represented by numbers. That’s how computers work, right? We use 1’s and 0’s to represent.. Other things. And a series of 1’s and 0’s are vectors - pointers to other things that can be displayed on our screens.

If you’re using the capital latin letter A, that’s represented by U+0041. Because capital latin letter A - well that’s just a picture. All alphabets are pictures. Fractions are pictures. Emoji are pictures. If it’s going to be referenced by a computer, that computer needs to know what picture in that huge database to point to.

The Western Armenian Capital Letter Գ is U+0533. The fraction representing ⅔ is U+2154. And the Sparkles emoji? Well the Sparkles emoji is U+2728. ✨

Every character you can represent with a computer is stored in a huge encoding matrix called Unicode. And adding new symbols to Unicode is not a small situation. You have to develop a proposal, present to a committee, and get approval. It’s a process.

So sure, adding an alphabet might be a pretty easy ask, but adding a new emoji is a whole different situation. You need to prove that adding that emoji is significant and culturally important. Because if we just added every new emoji we had an idea for, this matrix would be infinitely large. Larger than it is already.

Now every once in a while, new emojis get added to Unicode. And you might have noticed that eventually, everyone gets the same ones. Not necessarily the exact same representations - those are decided by the platform. But everyone has the ability to send sparkles from one device, and someone will receive the sparkles on the other device.

So If we look back through all the Emoji versions, trying to find the first use of the sparkle emoji, we can go back. And back. We know It was in Emoji 15.0. It was in Emoji 5.0. And if you keep looking further and further, it turns out, the sparkles emoji goes all the way back to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.

But, we were using emoji before 2015, right? They’re clearly not a new concept. And the answer to that is.. yes. But it’s also that 2015 was the first year that Unicode decided emoji were important enough to spin out into their own version numbering scheme. So even though Emoji 1.0 officially came out in 2015, it was actually released with Unicode 8.0. Fun.

See it turns out, Unicode has actually supported emoji since Unicode 6.0, which was released in.. 2010. And GUESS WHAT. If you look at THAT set of emoji - the FIRST set of emoji supported by Unicode, the Sparkle emoji was in that one too!

So.. alright. We tracked it back to 2010. But this still doesn’t.. Explain what it means, right? And if you look at other emoji that were released in Unicode 6.0, you’ll find a lot of.. Different symbols? Like what does this mean? Or this? Why would Unicode include linked paperclips? Or all of these random symbols? Like if I was creating the first emoji supported by this universal standards organization, I just don’t know if sparkles would be in there?

But then.. I stumbled upon some documents.

In February 2008, a group of Google engineers led by Mark Davis submitted this document to Unicode, trying to get them to officially add emoji to the list of characters the organization was supposed to handle. Unicode had previously said no to emoji, and made the case that this was a little out of their scope but.. This time was different.

See this time, Mark didn’t just ask Unicode to support emoji. This time, Mark and his team submitted a document with proposed implementations of.. Pretty much every emoji that existed at the time. And you might notice that there are 3.. Different versions of each emoji in this document, with one of the three being proposed as the Unicode representation. And if you look at the header of those 3 categories, there are 3 names heading each of these emoji - KDDI, DoCoMo, and Softbank.

And if you keep digging, you will see, maybe unfortunately for me, that Mark’s grandiose emoji proposal was not a single emoji creation effort. Oh no. As it turns out, this was, maybe fittingly, a unifying emoji effort. Because before Unicode supported them, there wasn’t just 1 single emoji set, there were multiple.

Before Unicode 6.0, there were three major competing emoji sets, pretty much exclusively in Japan. But instead of having a standardized encoding for how all emoji should be displayed, each of these companies just kinda.. Made stuff? Sometimes they overlapped, but not always! And this was not a good situation! Sometimes you’d send an emoji to a friend on a different telecom and receive a totally different one. Sometimes one of the telecoms would make a similar, but not exactly similar emoji. And sometimes you’d get it and just receive a pile of garbled nonsense. They even made a term for this! It’s called Mojibake.

So Mark saw this, and was like “Alright. That’s not good. Let’s not do that. But let’s also not redo all this work”. So he just.. added every emoji from all 3 major Japanese telecoms to its Emoji set, and picked out his own suggested implementation for each, which he proposed to Unicode in this new document. And guess who’s there.

But.. if these 3 companies all made sparkle emoji.. One of them had to make the Sparkle first, right? Like I assume one made it, it got popular, and then the others copied them.

So I’m searching each of these names, and IMMEDIATELY one pops out to me. According to the New York Museum of Modern art, the original set of Emoji was made by NTT DoCoMo. And.. they have them displayed in the museum.

The New York Museum of Modern Art is in New York… I live in New York.

I think you can see where this is going.

Ok. So as you can see, there are a bunch of emoji here. 176. You’ve got all the classics you’d expect to see. You’ve got the red heart. You’ve got the sun. But that. There! That right there is the sparkle emoji!

The MoMA says this is from NTT DoCoMo, and they have a whole book and all this information about these emoji from their inventor, Shigetaka Kurita.

Now the story goes that Mr. Kurita’s employer, NTT DoKoMo, one of the biggest telecoms in Japan was working on a new, early form of mobile internet called i-mode in 1997, back before any kind of smartphone. Way back when everyone was still on flip phones with small displays and super limited space. And at some point in development, Mr. Kurita had the idea to create icons he called Emoji - e meaning picture in, and moji meaning character. Again, all the way in 1997!

So it turns out, this thing isn’t new.. At all. No. These AI companies didn’t hijack something from 2019. Or 2015. Or even 2010. It turns out, the sparkle emoji is even more OG. From when Mr. Kurita was working on what is widely considered the ORIGINAL set of emoji, way back in 1997.

So ok I mean.. How in the heck. How did something originating back that far become the symbol of our current future? Was that always its intended use? I don’t think so?? But if not, what was it even for? What was the sparkle FOR??

You can ask a lot of people, and they’ll all probably tell you something different. Some people will say it’s magic. Some people will say it’s flair. I don’t think anyone anticipated that it could also be AI. But I needed to know. And the only way I was going to find out the original meaning of the sparkles is to ask the guy who invented it.

To get to the source, I flew to Japan and interviewed Shigetaka Kurita, the man who is widely considered the to be the inventor of the emoji.

The following is a select number of questions and answers of our interview for the purpose of this project, but I also asked him about the invention of emoji, the future of glyphs, and more in the full interview, which I’ve posted on my David Imel Extras YouTube Channel here.

David: “How did you decide what emojis to use for the first set that you proposed to NTT DoCoMo?”

Shigetaka: When we had decided on a number I started thinking about what emoji would make up those 200 emoji, and I roughly divided them into three categories.

The first, relating to the initial inspiration, was in order enrich the conveying of information. For example emoji for weather ☀️, or sports 🏀, or emoji you could use for types of news.

Also emoji for other types of information such as ✂️ for a salon, or a 🍔 for a burger joint, and other emoji that could be used for eating and drinking establishments.

The second category related to the second inspiration of using emoji to convey emotion, such as happy 🙂, angry 😠, sad 😞, or joy 🤩. Or decorative emoji like the sparkles ✨ emoji.

The 3rd category were general emoji that might be useful and easy to use for the platform, such as 🆓, 🆔 and "password".

So within these three categories I started with emoji that would likely to be used in a general way. Once we had decided on what type of information would be released on the platform I could base it on that. For example if we were releasing content on fortune telling, then we would need a fortune telling mark 🔮.

We used Japanese manga as inspiration for the emojis representing emotions. There is already a culture of using symbols to represent emotion in Japan, so we chose emotions that often are represented that was in manga, for example the symbol for sweat, or for something sparkly.

After listing up all of my ideas I had about 300 - 400 options, then I narrowed it down to 200. I was doing all of this by myself.

David: “I want to hone in on one specific emoji that I've been kind of ruminating on for a long time - the Sparkles emoji. Am I correct that that was in the original set of emoji that you invented?”

Shigetaka: Yes it was in the original set of emoji. That emoji has its origins in manga.

For a long time in manga when the artist wants to represent something sparkling, like a twinkle in someone's eye, or a shiny object, or just to emphasize that an object is sparkly, they use that kind of mark.

David: “So at least in the United States people have started, over the last three to five years, using the Sparkles emoji as an emphasis emoji. They’ll say something like “I just did this and that's ✨ growth ✨ and they'll put sparkles on either side of the emoji. Is that something that also happens in Japan at all? And did you ever expect that that particular emoji would be used for other reasons than the intended original use?”

Shigetaka: No there is not that usage, in Japan we usually just use it at the end of a sentence, and it always has a positive implication, like for comments expressing a positive response to someones opinion.

I guess the heart is for expressing love, and the surprise mark is for emphasis, so I wonder what kind of meaning is expressing. A lot of people use it randomly to express a vague positive kind of feeling, so hearing about that completely different usage is really interesting.

David: “Something that has specifically interested me recently is that probably in the last two years with the rise of artificial intelligence in the United States and around the world on the internet, AI companies have started using the sparkle emoji for new AI features.

So now when they release a new feature or a new product and they call it something AI, they always put the sparkle emoji immediately after that. And have you seen that or do you know about that at all?”

Shigetaka: “No, but I think its interesting.

I guess maybe it is a meme in America? That something sparkly is being used to represent the cutting edge technology of AI. I think this is really fitting usage of the emoji.

One usage of an emoji by people with the same values or in a certain context could be incomprehensible in a completely different context or by people of a different culture. I think this is how it should be used and it results in a really interesting phenomena.”

David: “Are you surprised at how these companies have taken to use it for artificial intelligence? And does that make sense to you in the context of the Japanese way of using the emoji?”

Shigetaka: “Mainly, for this usage, I do not think people in Japan would have a hard time also accepting it in this context.

Japan is just starting to adopt AI for a variety of things, and if an AI company were to use the Sparkles emoji to represent the AI, I think people would quite easily accept that meaning.

For example, if chat GPT, which is becoming popular in Japan, were the first to use the sparkles emoji, I think people would be like "ahh, AI is represented by the sparkles emoji".

As the role of emoji is to represent preexisting things, making a new emoji for AI might just feel like a corporate logo.

If someone were to make something from scratch it would feel less like an emoji and more an extension of CI design.”

David: “Thank you very much! This has been great.”

Shigetaka: “Thank you!”

Ok, so at this point we’ve tracked the sparkle all the way back to 1997, and we got a glimpse at how it's been used in Japan up to now.

And it turns out that in Japan at least, the Sparkles have had a pretty concrete meaning for a long period of time. They’re not ironic. They don’t mean AI. They’re used to show beauty, or cuteness, or glamor. And there’s.. Actually not really a direct translation for them. At least not in English. The closest is Bishi sparkles, or Kira Kira.

So now that we know what this icon was originally used for, I think we can start working forwards. To figure out how it went from kawaii to AI. So I decided to call up a couple people who know a lot about this stuff.

Neil: “It’s what I would call the vocabulary of Japanese visual language, which is fairly uniform across media there.

In Japan, the Japanese visual language of Manga is everywhere. The instruction manuals look like Manga. The literature looks like Manga. Some say it’s the only graphic style that exists there.

The Japanese visual language of Manga and Anime is on everything. It is everything. On instruction manuals and the subway and the immigration terminal at the airport. It’s deeply embedded into their culture.

I mean, remember when Mr. Kurita said this:

Shigetaka: “We used Japanese manga as inspiration for the emojis representing emotions. There is already a culture of using symbols to represent emotion in Japan”

Japan developed this culture of symbols representing emotion in manga and anime. And because Manga makes up a huge part of Japan’s visual language, those icons and symbols found their way into the culture in general. And eventually, this culture gave way to some pretty interesting concepts.

Neil: “Sparkles are what I would call a visual affix. So that means they have to attach to something else. In the same way that prefixes or suffixes attach to a base word.

So for example, ‘believe’ + ‘able’. Able is the affix. So it gives you believable, right? Or, ‘un’ plus ‘believable’ gives you ‘unbelievable’, right? So you get these affixes that attach. - they can't stand alone. Generally, the sparkles in their original context are affixes, meaning they have to attach to something to indicate that thing as being cute.

Manga and anime have a ton of these visual affixes - these emotional cues to help people know what these characters are feeling. Some people call them morphemes.

Like have you seen either of these symbols? These are both Japanese visual affixes. And they only have the meaning they do because they’ve been locally contextualized by Japanese visual culture.

But.. remember how we got emoji in the first place?

In 2008, those Google engineers and unicode didn’t want to just.. Create a totally separate set of emoji. The goal of unicode is to unify encodings so that we can all communicate with similar representations and avoid that mojibake. So when emoji got proposed to unicode they just took what Japan had already done with emoji and added them to unicode.

So suddenly, the rest of the world using unicode had to contend with all of these symbols, icons, and visual affixes that they didn’t have any context for. Like seriously. Go look through your emoji keyboard right now. You’ll see a ton of symbols you don’t have any context for. You’ll see yen constantly. And you’ll see a ton of references to Japan. Wild, right?

Ok. So now when you see a symbol like this, that you don’t have any pre-existing context for, there’s 2 ways your brain can interpret it.

The first, is through something called Iconicity. This is when the symbol means.. What it is. So for example, the sun emoji. It mostly just means.. Sun. Easy enough. Great.

But then, there’s something called symbolicity. That means the icon has a literal meaning, but it’s also got additional contextual meaning imbued on top. So the symbolicity of the sun could be ‘happy’.

Neil specifically mentions the lightbulb 💡. It is.. A lightbulb. But at least where I’m from, it also represents ‘inspiration’. Another example is the skull emoji 💀. Right now people use it to indicate humor or a funny form of dread, but it is also a literal skull, right?

Symbolicity is very contextual - very localized culturally. Obviously, global platforms on the internet are going to allow those groups interacting with a symbol in a specific way to be much wider, but there are so many instances where certain groups will use things that get transformed into symbols that other groups don’t understan

The skull symbol is a great example of that. The skull emoji went from “That’s so funny I’m dying laughing” to “I’m dying laughing” to “I’m dead” to “Dead” to just.. 💀. We have multiple icons that started out this way. The cap 🧢 emoji. Fire 🔥. Popcorn 🍿. Our symbols change at the speed of culture.

But what happens when you don’t understand the context? Like for example, I only recently saw someone use the 🧢 emoji for the first time. And I didn't know that it’s supposed to mean “lying” now. So I just saw a hat. I saw its iconicity. That’s all you can really fall back on.

In the case of a lot of these Japanese visual affixes, there really is nothing to fall back on, because they don’t actually represent anything... real. Like this icon 💠 - it’s not real. It’s just used for cuteness and flair. The anger icon 💢, I mean it originally was a popping vein on someone's head, then conventionalized enough to become this on someone’s head. Then conventionalized to be on a rock and make the rock angry. And now it’s just an icon for anger. It’s lost its iconicity to mean a vain. Now it’s purely symbolic.

But the sparkles.. The sparkles are an interesting one. Do sparkles exist in real life? Technically.. No. They aren’t actual things. But they are things that something.. Does.. right? Water glimmers. Stars twinkle. Maybe that’s why Samsung used it as fireworks?

Keith: “When it was first introduced to the western world people began to use it not quite in this way, but as a kind of decoration across posts on various social platforms, or indeed as part of their bios on those same social platforms. You'll very often see it even to this day used in people's usernames on certain platforms.

When the sparkles first got exported to the rest of the world, people immediately started using them in this fun, decorative way. Because what do they resemble? One thing would be glitter. The sparkles are ✨ digital glitter ✨. Just like you might add glitter to your name tag at a party, people started using digital glitter on their digital name tags.

We didn’t have the context of Kira Kira, the Bishi sparkles that are supposed to mean perfect, adorable, etc. We leaned more on the iconicity of sparkles. The iconicity of shininess. And a lot of things are shiny! A lot of things dazzle and glitter. It’s adaptable!

Jennifer Daniel: “You know what I think is great about the sparkle is it means nothing  and everything. It's very contextually dependent. And that allows people to imbue it with meaning.  And I think that flexibility, like on its own, what is a sparkle?”

I also talked to Jennifer Daniel for this story. She’s the current Chair of the Emoji Subcommittee for the Unicode Consortium and also a designer at Google. If you love Emoji Kitchen, she did that too.

Jennifer: “What does that mean? Really? Like, sure. It means magic, I guess. But like, in a sentence, like, it was so great to see you. Sounds so sarcastic. It has such range.”

Right! People used the sparkles for decoration for a while, but as culture changed, especially internet culture, western culture became a lot more sarcastic. A lot more ironic.  And at some point in the last few years, depression humor and self deprecating humor really took over. This is the humor of gen Z. Nothing is serious.

Jennifer Daniel: “And the thing about a sarcastic mark is like the whole humor of sarcasm is that it's ambiguous, right? Like you don't actually know if they're being serious or not, or if they are being sarcastic. And so when you have to explain it, it takes all the air out of the bite of sarcasm.  So when you look at the glyphs like sparkles, it's denoting sarcasm without screaming. I'm being sarcastic.”

So the tension of bookending something inherently NOT sparkly. Not shiny, with shiny sparkles. I mean that’s funny.

So then how did it get to AI? We know this icon is very.. Very contextually dependent. And we know that the primary iconicity it’s going to represent is shininess, since we don’t necessarily have as established an understanding of its symbolicity in the US.

Here’s my thesis:

We only have emoji because of Japan. And Japan’s visual language of Manga and Anime includes a ton of visual affixes that we don’t necessarily have an understanding of in other cultures. So when they were exported to Unicode, we were faced with all these icons that we don’t understand. Some of them, we’ll probably never understand, because they are purely symbolic. And we don’t have the context for that symbolicity. But some of them.. Some of them. We can re-use and add our own contextual understanding on top.

So sparkles, over the years, have changed symbolic meaning as our culture has changed. We’ve imbued them with different forms of meaning. From literal sparkliness to ironic sparklines to magic. But their iconicity of being a shine. Something attention grabbing, and new, and potentially magical. That was the perfect icon to be taken by AI companies.

They could have used the robot icon, but that’s a bit cold. We could have used a CPU, but it would have felt a little too complex and technical. These companies want AI to feel magical, and sparkly, and new. And that’s exactly what the iconicity of the sparkles imbues.

And now.. Here we are. I still don’t know WHO was the first one to start doing this, but at least I finally know why. And before I go, I figure it’s worth getting Mr. Kurita’s perspective on this, too

Shigetaka: I do think the sparkles emoji is a good solution. Of course, if someone were to design something original it would probably catch on. But getting that original design into mainstream usage would take time.

I mean making something from scratch is fine, but personally I think using the sparkles emoji is a great idea. As the role of emoji is to represent preexisting things, making a new emoji for AI might just feel like a corporate logo. If someone were to make something from scratch it would feel less like an emoji and more an extension of CI design.

So I think the better idea is what they have done with the sparkles emoji, to use something that people already have an association for, an association is similar to the association people have for AI.

And ya know what. If Mr. Kurita San is ok with it. I guess I’ll have to deal with it too. But just so you AI companies know.. I’m still gonna use it the way I always have.

Thanks for reading. I’ll catch you guys next time I’ve got something to say. See ya.

Thanks for reading Futura! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.