This trend is far older than the AI era. The British magazine Private eye for many years in the 1990s had a running joke in which each issue displayed the new logos of old companies that had spent a fortune on rebranding. All of them were variations on circles.
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.
Claude is the only one that looks like an asshole. The rest are just circular, or not even that. Does every circle in the world look like an asshole? Car wheels? Pizzas? Camera Lenses? Ferris wheels? This is like a Rorschach test.
Or perhaps the logo is a depiction of us, the little "products" running around burning and paying for tokens... we're certainly more receptive after a few months of subscription softening-up.
OpenAI's own logo description was also written by you-know who: https://openai.com/brand/ The part I find funny is "right angles introduce the precision and structure that technology demands" while the logo is hexagonal and has no right angles at all. Precision and structure not included!
"Why so many brands change their logos and look like everybody else".
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.
No, they're definitely the reverse. They're "the singularity." Most obviously clear in Grok's which is a literal pictogram of a black hole. But these are entities that suck things up, not produce things.
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.
Perfect analogy for AI actually a reverse butt-hole that sucks up the internet like a blackhole and then you go to it and it shits out as much of an answer as you are willing to feed it by massaging it with electrical stimulation. And now our digital world is being contaminated with all of this digital fecal matter further hastening the enshittingulatity.
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.
The OpenAI logo and “swirling hexagon” in general is reminiscent of the old logo of SNET (Southern New England Telephone), except it’s a pentagon. I used to draw this on my book covers at school to make life feel more engaging.
Reminds me of the Telecom New Zealand rebranding. The old logo: the word Telecom, with lines through the "o" reminiscent of wires passing through a loading coil. The old name: Telecom (obviously) as in telecommunications. Conveys: We do phones. We do wires. We do long distance talking.
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.
I guess it has to do with the fact that everything is greyscale nowadays ... did you notice there are no more coloured cars, and the few that are there are all faded.
I'm guessing limited car colors benefits the manufacturers more so than the customer. Less choice means less cost. Additionally, by avoiding 'polarizing' colors, they likely won't have issues with unsellable stock.
Freudian psycho-analysis offers insight into this phenomenon. According to Freud, "the whole significance of the anal zone is reflected in the fact that few neurotics are to be found without their special scatological practices, ceremonies, and so on, which they carefully keep secret" [1]. By this logic, AI company logos are unconsciously projecting the hidden negative externalities of their operations.
[1] Quoted from "Infantile Sexuality," in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey, Basic Books, 2000, pp. 52-3.
Talking about bad design what on earth is going on with Amazon's new fav-icon, it's the same reddish-orange as Alibaba and Aliexpress and looks utterly unremarkable.
A man goes to a psychiatrist. To start things off, the psychiatrist suggests they start with a Rorschach Test. He holds up the first picture and asks the man what he sees.
"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."
Maybe author watched too many dog videos? Every dog face looks like anus, it can defecate and lick in both direction. Once you go dog, entire world is your a toliet and every thing turns into buthole!
Dead bird on road? Better lick it, not to miss its cloaka!
What if, your brain is over-sexualized and you are obsessed with butthole, to the point your mind associate almost all round objects/shapes with buttholes? Maybe the logo's aren't the problem but rather degeneracy stuck in the brain. Now, think of a doughnut. Disgusting. :p
This trend is far older than the AI era. The British magazine Private eye for many years in the 1990s had a running joke in which each issue displayed the new logos of old companies that had spent a fortune on rebranding. All of them were variations on circles.
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.
Claude is the only one that looks like an asshole. The rest are just circular, or not even that. Does every circle in the world look like an asshole? Car wheels? Pizzas? Camera Lenses? Ferris wheels? This is like a Rorschach test.
OpenAI is more... open. Maybe that's what they wanted to communicate.
A good question to pose to Sam.
Or perhaps the logo is a depiction of us, the little "products" running around burning and paying for tokens... we're certainly more receptive after a few months of subscription softening-up.
Yes, a lot of commenters here (and the author) outing themselves.
And if I had to choose, I would say that the Claude logo is probably the most distinct / imaginative out of the ones listed.
Buttholes occur in nature all the time
If I not misheard (I don't know, just remember it), even the fetus development basically starts from the butthole.
That's beautiful
I didn’t realize Claude owned half of the companies.
>Then came the redesign: a perfect circle with a subtle gradient and central void.
I don’t see the gradient, their logo is black and white. Where’s the gradient? Was this written by an AI hallucinating?
OpenAI's own logo description was also written by you-know who: https://openai.com/brand/ The part I find funny is "right angles introduce the precision and structure that technology demands" while the logo is hexagonal and has no right angles at all. Precision and structure not included!
I’m convinced this is a joke by Ives cause there’s no way he’d approve that description without checking it had 90 degrees
You are absolutely right! It was an honest mistake on my part. The absence of colour is the smoking gun.
Lines are getting thinner closer to the center. This is not a gradient, but I understand what they meant. AI would use correct word for this.
You're right, there's no gradient.
Ironically, yes.
"Why so many brands change their logos and look like everybody else".
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.
They’re apertures; symbolically things emerge from them.
“…but that’s really all a butthole is, an aperture” - Louis CK
Aperture Science
We do what we must because we can For the good of all of us, except the ones who are dead
This explains so much.
We doodoo what we must.
No, they're definitely the reverse. They're "the singularity." Most obviously clear in Grok's which is a literal pictogram of a black hole. But these are entities that suck things up, not produce things.
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.
Perfect analogy for AI actually a reverse butt-hole that sucks up the internet like a blackhole and then you go to it and it shits out as much of an answer as you are willing to feed it by massaging it with electrical stimulation. And now our digital world is being contaminated with all of this digital fecal matter further hastening the enshittingulatity.
Claude’s logo is closer to a dandelion than an aperture (though closer to a butthole than either)
Also, did you try clicking the Claude logo? https://x.com/ertug/status/2072339797708849398
This seems to no longer work, or at least, I clicked over 100 times and didn't get anything.
It's still working for me, but only on the web (desktop) interface.
Jung might have seen a relation to circular maNDalas, which as per him were apparently everywhere: https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=circular+mandala
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.
Did they make you sign an NDa for your spelling of mandala?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRANS
This brought to my attention the following claim by OpenAI, regarding a logo which does not have any right angles:
> right angles introduce the precision and structure that technology demands
https://openai.com/brand/#:~:text=right%20angles
> Our primary wordmark requires prescribed clear space and should NOT be used with the Blossom.
Ironic missing space right there...
The OpenAI logo and “swirling hexagon” in general is reminiscent of the old logo of SNET (Southern New England Telephone), except it’s a pentagon. I used to draw this on my book covers at school to make life feel more engaging.
https://logodix.com/logo/1065826.jpg
More like design by iPhone. They keep making the corners rounder and rounder, so the only way to be safe is a round logo.
Of course this is a uniquely american problem. The world uses android
Yeah, after recent Samsung One UI and Google icons change...hm.
Something about Claude logo looking like Kurt Vonnegut's drawing in Breakfast of Champions always made me hesitant to use Claude.
I'm gonna choose to believe they all involved AI in the design process and AI has a cheeky fetish for humiliating humans.
Never thought about it.
But now I can't unsee it.
Before all of these AIs, HAL 9000 was designed as a shiny asshole with a glowing red light at its center. He was also a real asshole.
In a similar vein, some time ago I got curious why the Grafana logo looks like the Zerg emblem see https://www.reddit.com/r/grafana/comments/1o79zxy/grafana_lo....
I am almost certain it is star or spark.
But again, if someone is looking for assholes, they will find them.
Reminds me of the Telecom New Zealand rebranding. The old logo: the word Telecom, with lines through the "o" reminiscent of wires passing through a loading coil. The old name: Telecom (obviously) as in telecommunications. Conveys: We do phones. We do wires. We do long distance talking.
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.
The flag of India gives me that vibe.
Fantastic article. It started like a joke but then added some pretty interesting notes (still using a funny tone).
> Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?
What did AI say when you asked it? I got a slightly funny but reassuring answer.
Once seen, it cannot be unseen. Thanks.
Thank you. I once asked Claude the same. It reminded me of the flag from the tv show community
A butthole and a drain hole. Sounds like they are spot on. Give it to society in the butt and drain all societie's resources
I guess it has to do with the fact that everything is greyscale nowadays ... did you notice there are no more coloured cars, and the few that are there are all faded.
I think because people are visually overstimulated from all the content in their phones, they prefer plain minimal design in the physical world.
I'm guessing limited car colors benefits the manufacturers more so than the customer. Less choice means less cost. Additionally, by avoiding 'polarizing' colors, they likely won't have issues with unsellable stock.
imo: sub-conscious messaging to get you used to looking at a loading screen for a large portion of your workday
It's because OpenAI starts with an O, and an O looks like a butthole?
When we started work on our logo for Rig I literally told our design agency we cant do butt holes
Form follows function but really it’s just probably modeled on the founders.
Kudos to DeepSeek and Midjourney for doing something different.
DeepSeek has the best logo.
Does the openai logo look like that because .. OpenAI? Then others followed suit?
Same, I often wondered why the openai logo looks like an interpretation of goatse.
It's good that it (they?) identified the smoking gun, and a fact that changed everything
Their product is a result of digestion.
Freudian psycho-analysis offers insight into this phenomenon. According to Freud, "the whole significance of the anal zone is reflected in the fact that few neurotics are to be found without their special scatological practices, ceremonies, and so on, which they carefully keep secret" [1]. By this logic, AI company logos are unconsciously projecting the hidden negative externalities of their operations.
[1] Quoted from "Infantile Sexuality," in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey, Basic Books, 2000, pp. 52-3.
Because they are ran by assholes?
AI plop.
Talking about bad design what on earth is going on with Amazon's new fav-icon, it's the same reddish-orange as Alibaba and Aliexpress and looks utterly unremarkable.
A man goes to a psychiatrist. To start things off, the psychiatrist suggests they start with a Rorschach Test. He holds up the first picture and asks the man what he sees.
"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."
Maybe author watched too many dog videos? Every dog face looks like anus, it can defecate and lick in both direction. Once you go dog, entire world is your a toliet and every thing turns into buthole!
Dead bird on road? Better lick it, not to miss its cloaka!
That's the universal symbol of enshittification.
It the synthetic IQ goatse
This blogger's gonna go nuts when they learn about the ouroboros.
Are people who use lots of AIs butthole surfers?
What is seen, cannot be unseen
What if, your brain is over-sexualized and you are obsessed with butthole, to the point your mind associate almost all round objects/shapes with buttholes? Maybe the logo's aren't the problem but rather degeneracy stuck in the brain. Now, think of a doughnut. Disgusting. :p
Interesting Rorschach test.
Walmart Logo
Because life in the womb starts at the butthole.
The logo for the Brazilian Institute of Oriental Studies is a masterpiece :-)
If I start an ai company I guarantee I will get a butthole logo and it will be animated.
I also wrote about this before[1], and I think it's because the design itself ultimately targets specific consumers.
[1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/casual/programmers-sell-ox-not...
Why'd Bill Gates name his company after his thing?
Perhaps to symbolise the quality of the material they extrude...
Slop rhymes with plop.
My son remarked: because they produce shit.
Reminded me of Gavin Belson Signature from Silicon Valley :-D
A brilliantly designed horizontal logo to fit on server racks!
"I like it! It's bold!" lolol