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.

>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?

They’re apertures; symbolically things emerge from them.

“…but that’s really all a butthole is, an aperture” - Louis CK

Have you tried clicking the Claude logo? https://x.com/ertug/status/2072339797708849398

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

Something about Claude logo looking like Kurt Vonnegut's drawing in Breakfast of Champions always made me hesitant to use Claude.

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

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.

Never thought about it.

But now I can't unsee it.

We won’t have real AGIs until they can see this kind of pattern in logos.

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

"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.

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.

Thank you. I once asked Claude the same. It reminded me of the flag from the tv show community

I'm gonna choose to believe they all involved AI in the design process and AI has a cheeky fetish for humiliating humans.

I have a dirty mind, but I don't agree that all of them look like that. Claude is definitely looks like an external rectal sphincter. Grok is a ring that men have used for erectile dysfunction.

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.

This is the worship of the eye of the Horus, of the entity that is both all-seeing and all-engulfing.

Black Sun, Saturn (hexagon in OpenAI logo, anyone?), saturnalias and all the ensuing and tangential cults. The ouroboric cult of Singularity, etc.

The clergy beyond those AI corporations uses those symbols to express the intent for power, total control and surveillance.

The amount of esoteric obsession of those who print and own money to feed the AI beast, is staggering.

To each according to his wits.

Circle is the perfect shape. Take a rock, throw it in a water, you get circular ripple. Throw a brick, circular ripple. Throw a bicycle, circular ripple.

If your butthole looks like Copilot I recommend you have a trip to the doctors for a check up

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.

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

The flag of India gives me that vibe.

Ill be honest I wasnt expecting this to be on point

> Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?

What did AI say when you asked it? I got a slightly funny but reassuring answer.

When we started work on our logo for Rig I literally told our design agency we cant do butt holes

Fantastic article. It started like a joke but then added some pretty interesting notes (still using a funny tone).

Once seen, it cannot be unseen. Thanks.

Form follows function but really it’s just probably modeled on the founders.

Kudos to DeepSeek and Midjourney for doing something different.

It's good that it (they?) identified the smoking gun, and a fact that changed everything

Does the openai logo look like that because .. OpenAI? Then others followed suit?

It's because OpenAI starts with an O, and an O looks like a butthole?

Same, I often wondered why the openai logo looks like an interpretation of goatse.

Because they are ran by assholes?

imo: sub-conscious messaging to get you used to looking at a loading screen for a large portion of your workday

Their product is a result of digestion.

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."

That's the universal symbol of enshittification.

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.

This blogger's gonna go nuts when they learn about the ouroboros.

It the synthetic IQ goatse

What is seen, cannot be unseen

Someone watching too much porn :D.

AI plop.

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

Walmart Logo

Are people who use lots of AIs butthole surfers?

Interesting Rorschach test.

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...

Perhaps to symbolise the quality of the material they extrude...

Slop rhymes with plop.

Reminded me of Gavin Belson Signature from Silicon Valley :-D

My son remarked: because they produce shit.

Why'd Bill Gates name his company after his thing?

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!