If you spend even a modest proportion of your time online, you have almost certainly come across the SPARKLES emoji (✨). It’s a cheery and versatile symbol, and it is increasing found outside emoji’s usual habitat of text messages and social networks. Of late, in fact, SPARKLES has taken on a new gig that promises to significantly boost its profile, if not its popularity: ‘✨’ is now closely associated with that most divisive of technologies, AI.
Per Emojipedia, the SPARKLES emoji rode high throughout 2020 as the third most common emoji on Twitter after only ‘😂’ and ‘😭’. Keith Broni, Emojipedia’s editor-in-chief, attributed the emoji’s popularity to a rise in its use as a ✨whimsical✨, ✨magical✨ or ✨ironic✨ marker. Broni drew a comparison between this general pattern and the use of italics for the same purposes.1
Yet this temporary spike in popularity (‘✨’ was trending downwards by the end of 2020) was surely not enough to explain what happened next. As reported by Jazper Lu in the Wall Street Journal, in 2021 an “AI marketing” company named Jasper used the SPARKLES emoji in a marketing video — and from there, if indeed that was ground zero for the AI-sparkles fad, the practice spread like an airborne pathogen.2 By 2023, with a new wave of AI hype fuelled by a novel class of machine-learning algorithms called “transformers”, Spotify, Google, Zoom and OpenAI were all using ‘✨’ as a signifier for anything and everything connected to AI.3
Why did these titans of the tech world converge on ‘✨’? Lest you be deceived into imagining that the great and the good of the tech industry are any different to the rest of us, the answer is this: they couldn’t think of anything better. Lu cited “design and marketing executives” who claimed they had chosen the symbol simply because everyone else seemed to be making the same choice.2 This isn’t necessarily a bad reason — after all, if our various different computing devices employ conventions such as ‘🔍’ to mean “search”, or ‘💾’ for “save”, they are that much easier to use — but it doesn’t exactly speak to an industry which has scaled the heights of inspiration.
Groupthink aside, I do wonder if there is another reason for SPARKLES’ adoption as an AI mascot, and a ironic reason at that.
The basic properties of an emoji, such as its name, appearance, and numeric code point, are open to all. Although the Unicode Consortium claims copyright in its specifications, website, and other documents,4 it is nevertheless free and legal to build a computer system or typeface that makes use of Unicode’s work. Indeed, the internet of today would not work without Unicode’s accommodating approach to intellectual property: too many web pages and emails would arrive on our screens with unintelligible text and broken characters.
My thesis, then, is that the SPARKLES emoji’s lack of legal encumbrance makes it a tempting and low-risk choice. Google can use ‘✨’ to mean “AI”; Facebook can use ‘✨’ to mean “AI”; Microsoft can use ‘✨’ to mean “AI”; and they need not — indeed, cannot — waste each other’s time or money arguing in court over who owns it. I have no idea whether this is true or not (appropriately enough, Google’s Gemini chatbot didn’t know either), but it seems fitting that a legally charmed icon should become the symbol of a technology built on a foundation of voracious copyright infringement.
- 1.
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Broni, Keith. “It’s Not Just You. The Sparkles Emoji Is ✨Everywhere✨”. Emojipedia (blog).
- 2.
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Lu, Jazper. “How the Sparkles Emoji Became the Symbol of Our AI Future”. Wall Street Journal, sec. Tech.
- 3.
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Cheng, Michelle. “How ✨ Became the Unofficial AI Emoji”. Quartz.
- 4.
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“Unicode Terms of Use”. Accessed November 9, 2025.