Why do such a lot of AI corporate trademarks appear to be buttholes?

Feedback is New Scientist’s fashionable sideways have a look at the most recent science and generation information. You can publish pieces you imagine might amuse readers to Feedback through emailing feedback@newscientist.com

Blossom? Really?

The previous few years have noticed the emergence of a perfect many AI firms. This is very thrilling/alarming (delete consistent with whether or not you purchased stocks early), however it has additionally had a secondary result. Along with the proliferation of AI firms has come a proliferation of AI corporate trademarks.

The interesting factor, highlighted through a number of publications, is that many of those trademarks glance near-identical. According to sociologist James I. Bowie, writing for Fast Company in 2023, the craze is for a “stylized hexagon” with an implied rotation. This, he notes, is similarly suggestive of “portals opening to wondrous new worlds”, “widening Yeatsian gyres” and “toilets flushing”.

Or lets have a look at it the way in which Radek Sienkiewicz, a developer who blogs as VelvetShark, does. Sienkiewicz famous that these kinds of trademarks have the next components: a round form, a central opening or point of interest, radiating components from the centre and comfortable natural curves. This, he says, is an “apt description” of “a butthole“.

Feedback tested the trademarks of OpenAI, Apple Intelligence, Claude and others, and we will be able to verify that, sure, they do undergo greater than a passing resemblance to a sphincter, and whenever you see it you’ll’t unsee it. DeepSeek and Midjourney are about the one exceptions: their trademarks appear to be a whale and a sailboat at the sea. But perhaps they’re going to quickly get sucked into the round brand maelstrom.

Why such a lot of stylised hexagons? Perhaps the whirling patterns are supposed to symbolise the recursive nature of concept, the facility of AIs to iteratively reinforce their working out of the sector.

Not consistent with OpenAI, although. Its emblem pointers be offering an in depth reason behind the corporate’s brand, which it calls “blossom” to make you assume it isn’t a butthole. “At its heart, the logo captures the dynamic intersection between humanity and technology – two forces that shape our world and inspire our work. The design embodies the fluidity and warmth of human-centered thinking through the use of circles, while right angles introduce the precision and structure that technology demands.” Readers are loose to make of that what they’re going to.

Personally, Feedback has a operating speculation about those trademarks. It comes to the mental phenomenon referred to as “groupthink”.

Difficult moment album

One of Feedback’s favorite genres of data is “things everyone knows, but that have obvious counterexamples that everyone also knows if they just think about it for a second”. Hence, we grew to become with glee to a learn about in Psychology of Music concerning the “sophomore slump”: the meant tendency for musicians’ moment albums to be worse than their debuts, the proverbial tricky moment album.

The learn about used to be originally printed remaining November however used to be highlighted through science author Philip Ball on Bluesky in April – and right here we’re in May, in spite of everything publishing one thing about it. Feedback is not anything if now not tardy.

The analysis purports to be “the first large-scale multi-study attempt to test… whether a sophomore slump bias exists”. The authors read about over 2000 opinions through critics and over 4000 fan opinions. In each datasets, the scores of album high quality declined over the process maximum artists’ careers. But best the critics’ opinions confirmed “a significant and substantial sophomore slump”.

At this level, the learn about is going off into an extended dialogue of why this may well be. Could cognitive biases be in play? There’s additionally “regression to the mean”: a truly excellent debut album is atypical and can have a tendency to get disproportionate consideration, however the rules of probability imply the follow-up is not going to be as excellent. Feedback, in the meantime, is reminded of a quote that is going again no less than to Elvis Costello in 1981: “You have 20 years to write your first album and you have six months to write your second one.”

The factor is, the sophomore droop is a statistical tendency at best possible. There are quite a few examples of artists whose moment albums have been higher than their debuts: we considered Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Nirvana simply off the highest of our head, earlier than our thoughts drifted to the Beastie Boys, Pixies and Taylor Swift. The responses to Ball’s publish comprise many extra.

Feedback additionally wonders if the second-album phenomenon is confined to rock and pa track, or if it extends to different, extra rarefied genres. Is the sophomore droop additionally an issue confronted through composers of acid jazz or aleatoric track? And if this is the case, how would you inform?

Small-scale smuggling

Executive editor Timothy Revell attracts Feedback’s wandering consideration to a document from Reuters on 15 April: “Kenyan brokers bust plot to smuggle massive ants on the market to international insect fanatics“. The tale explains that 4 smugglers were stuck seeking to site visitors hundreds of reside ants out of Kenya, together with massive African harvester ants (Messor cephalotes). This species is it sounds as if a lot in call for amongst ant-lovers (formicidaephiles?), and a unmarried queen can fetch virtually £100.

This is all very severe and necessary, however Tim sought after to flag one element. The tale quotes a “source in the ant trade” concerning the forms had to legally export M. cephalotes from Kenya. This individual “asked not to be named” as a result of ant buying and selling and smuggling “is a small world”.

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