How AI Stole the ✨ Sparkles ✨ Emoji

I wonder if you've seen this a lot recently see this is the sparkle emoji and over the years it's been used for a lot of things magic fairy dust Samsung decided to use it for fireworks one time and more recently since maybe around 2019 or 2020 I started using it for other things sometimes it was just to add some flare sometimes it was just a Vibe or a Sparky response I can't even really tell you what but maybe that's the entire reason that it's good right because whatever I'm trying to communicate with this can't really be described with words anyway in 2021 the internet started using this thing 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 number three spot of most used Emoji in the world according to scrape Twitter data and it took that from the pleading face emoji so you know the internet was hot on this thing and that's great we're vibing we're having fun we like the Emoji but then in late 2023 something happened our main story tonight concerns artificial intelligence or Ai and as AI gets better and better it's only going to make it more difficult to separate fact from fiction despite what you hear about artificial intelligence machines still can't think like a human but in the last few years they have become capable of learning ai ai ai ai ai ai a a a 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 seemingly overnight that emoji that I used to add that spice that a lot of the internet like to use for drama and excitement and sarcasm suddenly it was used to signify artificial intelligence almost every single feature that shipped in the last year and a half has had that sparkle Emoji slapped onto it features that claim that they're AI featured and you know maybe they are is it the new kind of AI that set off that chain reaction in the industry Transformer architectures and large language models and stable diffusion sometimes but also sometimes it's not sometimes it's just the same old Automation and machine learning that we've been using for decades and sometimes I'm not even sure you could consider some of the stuff AI at all but my point is why the Sparkles why did this industry decide to bootstrap my favorite emoji as its new mascot I mean there are a lot of options so I started looking into this and at first I was working backwards going back week by week month by month year by year looking for some indication as to why this industry decided to ship the sparkle emoji with every single new feature and update and I found some early examples like in 2020 Google photos added this sprkle Emoji as a button on the auto enhancement feature and before that in 2018 Twitter added this algorithmic timeline button with a sparkle on it that switched you between news feeds and before that Google added a single Sparkle to Google Docs for its explore feature which to be honest looks a hell of a lot like the new dazzling AI enhanced features that we're seeing right now but you know working backwards has some limits right like can search for days or months and yeah maybe you'll find some pretty early examples but then you find Fringe things like the fact that GE Healthcare has apparently been using the sparkle Emoji since before any of these things so if I can't figure out when I guess the question I should be asking myself is why and why requires context right so let's go back before chat GPT before Twitter or Google or any of that let's go back to when the sparkle Emoji became an emoji in the first place all right so every character that we can display on our devices has to be represented by numbers that's how computers work right a series of these ones and zeros are vectors they're pointers that point to other things like if you're using the capital Latin letter A that's represented by U plus 0041 because a is just a picture all alphabets are pictures fractions are pictures emojis are pictures like if you're referencing anything from a keyboard onto a computer that computer needs to know what symbol in the huge database to point to the Western Armenian capital letter Keem is u+ 0533 the fraction representing 2/3 is U plus 2154 and the sparkle Emoji well the sparkle Emoji is U plus 2728 every character that you can represent on a computer is stored in a huge encoding Matrix called Unicode and getting a new character added is not a small situation right you've got to draft a proposal present to a committee get approval like it's it's a pretty huge process so sure maybe adding an alphabet is a pretty easy ask but adding an emoji is a whole separate situation right like you've got to prove that that emoji is culturally relevant and significant and if we just added every Emoji we had an idea for that encoding Matrix would be infinitely larger than it already is but every once in a while new Emoji does get added to Unicode and eventually everyone gets the same ones maybe not the exact same representations like those are decided by the platforms but I should be able to send you a sparkle emoji and you should receive the sparkle Emoji so okay if we look back through the Emoji versions trying to find when the sparkle Emoji got added we can go back and back we know that it was an emoji 15. 0 turns out it was an emoji 5. 0 and if you go back further and further it turns out that the sparkle Emoji is an emoji 1.

0 in 2015 but we were using emoji before 2015 right like this is clearly not A New Concept and the answer to that is yes but it's also that 2015 was the first year that Unicode thought that emoji were important enough to spin out into their own numbering scheme so even though 2015 is when Emoji 1. 0 came out it actually came out alongside Unicode 8. 0 fun see it turns out that Unicode has actually supported Emoji since Unicode 6.

0 which was released in 2010 and guess what the sparkle Emoji is there too so okay we tracked the sparkle Emoji back to Unicode 6. 0 but that still doesn't really explain what they mean right and also if you look at all the other emoji that were released in 6. 0 there's a lot of random stuff in here like what is this symbol and what does this mean and why is this here like if I were to go and decide these are all the Emoji we're starting with I'm just not sure that I would have included the Sparkles but then I found these documents in February 2008 a team of Google engineers led by Mark Davis submitted this document to Unicode he was trying to get them to add Emoji as characters that Unicode was officially supposed to handle Unicode had previously said that it was a little bit out of their scope but this time it was a little bit different Mark and his team weren't just asking Unicode to support Emoji they were submitting a document that pretty much laid out the encoding of every emoji that existed at the time you might notice that there are three different versions of each Emoji in this document with one of these three being proposed as the Unicode representation and if you keep digging you'll see that maybe unfortunately for me Mark's grandiose Emoji creation effort was not a single Emoji creation effort it was maybe more fittingly a unifying Emoji creation effort because before Unicode there wasn't just one single set of emoji there were multiple before Unicode 6.