Should designers keep using the sparkle icon for AI features?

I've been skeptical of the sparkle since apps started piling onto it in 2023. From Google's Bard to Microsoft's Office and beyond, the sparkle emoji and its derivatives have come to represent generative AI features in apps. It feels like a standard, but how long will it last?

Think about the floppy disk. Most apps aligned on a floppy disc representation to allow people to save their work. But not only did floppy discs phase out of existence, so did the need to explicitly save files with the widespread adoption of auto-saving features. R.I.P. save icon. AI is likely headed the same way. As it spreads into everything, its capabilities stop feeling magical and start feeling like normal, expected functionality.

The "magic" framing has its own problems. Most companies use the sparkle to brand new AI features and hint at something mysterious behind them. That doesn't help anyone understand how a feature works or what it does with their data. If anything, it adds to the black box feel of these systems.

We went through this on Ask LukeW (yes, the thing you're using right now). We explored using the sparkle icon to enable people to generate suggested questions. After realizing how useful suggested questions were for exploring the contents of a site, and thereby getting the most value out of it, we shifted to generating them by default. No explicit user action required. We also moved them into people's gaze path so they wouldn't be missed. Bye-bye sparkle icon.

Research backs this up. Kate Moran found that people don't care about the technology, they care about the outcome. AI-powered is not a value-add. Solving someone's problem is a value-add. She also found that designers are making basic mistakes that don't have anything to do with AI (naming, icons, presentation). Meanwhile, smaller-scope AI features like automatic summaries that require no user interaction perform well because they integrate seamlessly into existing workflows.

To be fair, the floppy disk icon is still around because it maps to a clear action. The sparkle could survive the same way as a symbol for "generate this." But that's a much narrower job than "look, AI!"

So my advice: label things by what they do for people, and where you can, just do the useful thing by default. Obvious always wins.