7 ms·

Emoji use was stable from 2020-2024, then spiked in 2025. The authors don't attempt to explain it, but I bet AI is to blame. Anyone who has had to clean up AI c

Emoji use was stable from 2020-2024, then spiked in 2025. The authors don't attempt to explain it, but I bet AI is to blame. Anyone who has had to clean up AI comments riddled with stupid emojis from their code will understand this.

jasonsb 9mo ago
> Anyone who has had to clean up AI comments riddled with stupid emojis from their code will understand this. I have no idea what you're talking about. I code daily, with 80/90% of my work AI-assisted, and never had to clean one emoji. As for emojis appearing in EHRs, a more likely explanation is the growing presence of Gen Z professionals in healthcare, who are known for integrating emojis into their communication. This trend probably has little to do with AI and more to do with generational habits.
- zenethian 9mo ago
  I just had Claude generate a readme for me and it added at least 10 emoji to it.
  - kevin_thibedeau 9mo ago
    That's where they are prevalent. It's just mimicking its training set. If you use LLMs as Q&A oracles or code generators the emoji output is less frequent.
- nnnnico 9mo ago
  > I code daily, with 80/90% of my work AI-assisted, and never had to clean one emoji. do you read this code? I find it hard to believe unless you have llm instructions in your codebase that you are not aware of
  - Wowfunhappy 9mo ago
    Claude (the only model I use regularly) will definitely add emojis to non-code documentation and/or commit messages (which I almost never let it write, but it will sometimes try). However, I can't recall Claude ever adding emoji to code or in comments.
    - zem 9mo ago
      it has added emoji to shell script status output for me (green ticks, red crosses, etc)
      - Wowfunhappy 9mo ago
        Oh, yes it will do that sort of thing, I forgot about that. I don't think I mind in that context?
  - jasonsb 9mo ago
    I always read and review the code and it's true that the old models from 2023/2024 were using a lot of emojis. But that code was garbage. Since LLMs have started to write decent code, I haven't seen one emoji.
- RicoElectrico 9mo ago
  In the conversational mode it shits them like crazy. Depends on a particular fine-tune though.
- bpt3 9mo ago
  Gen Z has been entering the professional workforce (post college age) since approximately 2020, so I don't think they're to blame. AI generated text is littered with emojis in my experience as well, often used as bullets in the lists it loves to generate.
- kube-system 9mo ago
  I don't think an 8x spike over a year would be in any way explained by a demographic shift. I think your personal experiences are anecdotal, unique, and not representative of EHR users.
  - jasonsb 9mo ago
    Well, it is. Let's say that AI adds emojis to my code/text. Me, a millennial who hates emojis, will tell the AI to delete those emojis and never use them again in my code or my official documents. The gen Z guy who got his first job last week will love to keep them.
    - VanTheBrand 9mo ago
      Most people using LLMs wouldn’t even know you could tell it not to produce emoji. You are thinking about this like a coder not like a doctor.
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      - johnisgood 9mo ago
        If you can tell it instructions, and you know you can tell it instructions, then how smart do you have to be to realize that "omit emojis" is an instruction you can use? If what you said is true, I have no hope...
      - supriyo-biswas 9mo ago
        There’s an option in ChatGPT’s settings to lessen the use of emojis. Though most people never bother to change the default setting and I didn’t know of it myself until recently.
    - 0x1ch 9mo ago
      I'm Gen Z, also an engineer. I wouldn't bother removing them from the comments, but I wouldn't add them myself lol.
- nonethewiser 9mo ago
  Emojis are not widely used on platforms that dont make them easy to add. IE medical software on windows. >I have no idea what you're talking about. I code daily, with 80/90% of my work AI-assisted, and never had to clean one emoji. Yeah because they dont just add them to any generated code. Although if you ask them to make some sort of UI that might involve graphics, they will happily add lots of emojis. They do add them very liberally, especially in headings, for writing articles, blog posts, repots etc.
- RajT88 9mo ago
  I use AI daily and have to clean emojis. It depends on the task, or the particular product/agent you're using. ChatGPT is a lot more emoji-heavy than say the business Copilot. Claude code, never. GitHub copilot never. What I can tell you is, people I know who are SME's who are being paid several hundred thousand dollars a year this past year have started just copypastaing my questions into an LLM and regurgitating back to me whatever they said. From my friend who is a director of a medical research library, a huge number of doctors recently switched from googling shit to just running it through the free ChatGPT.
- zahlman 9mo ago
  > I have no idea what you're talking about. I code daily, with 80/90% of my work AI-assisted, and never had to clean one emoji. Compare the READMEs of GitHub repositories for low-rated Show HN submissions in 2025 vs 2024. It's really clear.
- tamimio 9mo ago
  > I have no idea what you're talking about. I code daily, with 80/90% of my work AI-assisted, and never had to clean one emoji. It depends on what you ask it. Asking it to code won't generate a single emoji, but ask it to make a list, summarize something, and similar tasks and you will have it all over. And I disagree with people who always try to stick whatever to "generational stuff" as if there's a distinct wall with total culture differences, plus assuming XYZ gen is a monolith to apply whatever label on. I think this is just an easy, lazy way to explain things that you couldn't understand or explain. Sure, you might have some differences between a 13-year-old and 55-year-old in some categories, but they still share a lot of common ground as well. But a 20-something and 30-something? Barely any difference, let alone at work where usually there are policies and whatnot that will restrict such differences from surfacing.
- CJefferson 9mo ago
  It must be different AIs. I grade student work, and I see a lot of Python generated by AI. I don't know exactly which AI, but about a third of the work I see is littered with emojis.
nonethewiser 9mo ago
>Emoji use was stable from 2020-2024, then spiked in 2025. That's from the article? Yeah I think there should be pretty much no doubt about that.
randycupertino 9mo ago
I have some coworkers who use AI in place of the bullets in bulleted lists and I don't hate it. It's fun and eye-catching and brings some novelty to our scientific work. One uses science themed emojis (he's a cardiologist so lots of cardiac hearts, test tubes and DNA emojis) and another uses custom-mojis that she designed after Piet Mondrian's art. I've also seen emojis popping up in official meeting minutes which is fine too. Why not spice it up with some whimsy.
- freehorse 9mo ago
  > brings some novelty to our scientific work Is this satire? I hope it is. Otherwise it seems like a sorry state that science currently is if it needs emojis to bring some novelty into it.
  - randycupertino 9mo ago
    Heh, I didn't intend it to be satire. When you spend 7 hours a day cleaning data, sending queries to research sites and doing patient profile review emojis spice it up and can be eye-catching and fun. Why not? I generally don't use them in routine practice but when I see some of my straight-laced coworkers strategically deploy them I don't hate it!
  - goodmythical 9mo ago
    Jesus, my dude, lighten up a bit. Consider this: You're a grad student who's been reading page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page of lack and white text. How is marking a particularly explosive comment with a graphic representation of an explosion any different from highlighting it? Or from Davinci's marginal scribbles? or from Feynman's wave diagrams? Or, for that matter, simply bolding, italicizing, or underlining it? Shit, why even format it at all? Who needs page breaks and indented paragraphs in something as serious as a scientific paper? God forbid we ever go so far as to implement more than one font. Changes to the methods by which we communicate are made on a regular basis. If people find them useful enough to put them in their own communications, and they do not harm the clarity of the transmission, who are we (or you in particular) to cry about it on the sidelines? You remind me of the person in the back of the room trying to invalidate a proof based on a misspelling that in no way impacts the validity of the proof. As if adding an emoji somehow invalidates the months or years of work that went in to producing the content that you are consuming at no cost and will likely benefit from without having contributed to the project in any meaningful way. I mean, seriously. Imagine someone's finally created a genuine cure for all cancers. They've spent the entire lives of hundreds of people and billions of dollars, and oh no! What's this? Aww, damn there's an emoji in one of the graphs. Damn. Too bad, I guess it's not going to be good enough for freehorse. Better go ahead and send it back for revisions. Can't publish it like that. Not now, not ever. Curing cancer's going to have to wait until we can force the author of this paper to conform to our arbitrary preferences.
ks2048 9mo ago
I’ve wondered why GenAI text has so many emojis, for example in README.md bullet points. I guess their RLHF data had it? On purpose? And various labs all the same? Because if they were just learning from web data (pre- a few years ago), this didn’t seem to be very prevalent.
- airstrike 9mo ago
  reddit
  - lotsofpulp 9mo ago
    Sprinkling in some reaction gifs would be helpful.
- GaryBluto 9mo ago
  It's to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
- rvnx 9mo ago
  The emojis and similar style is because models are learning from other models, as it is the easiest way to have RLHF data. Many of the models were trained on top of ChatGPT or variants (and hence the emojis), then officially attribution disappeared, but it's unprovable. This process is called distillation. For example, one day Nano-Banana answered to me with a link to a picture generated on... FAL platform (that did not exist). DeepSeek: https://i.redd.it/7nkucg2qelfe1.png https://i.redd.it/7nkucg2qelfe1.png Anthropic Claude: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1e34tkr/why_is_claude_35_sonnet_referring_to_itself_as/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1e34tkr/why_is_clau... Grok: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/GA8PGGSWYAE726-.jpeg https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/GA8PG... Gemini-Flash-Lite, if you squeeze it a bit: > I must state clearly: I am a large language model, trained by OpenAI. This is the core definition of ChatGPT. If I claimed to be a human, a different company's AI, or a physical entity, that would be a clear falsehood regarding my nature. but most has been fixed since Gemini 1.5-Pro Over time this is fading because now they have their own trained output, and all these companies actively replace references to OpenAI, and distilled, mixed with other training data, their own, cleaned up, distilled, so the source text disappeared. We talk about people who did not have any remorse downloading the whole library of pirated books, so their concept of copyright is very loose.
flexagoon 9mo ago
Why would it be 2025 though? LLM popularity happened a few years earlier
- NewJazz 9mo ago
  Adoption by health companies?
greenacred 9mo ago
At least there are some signals that AI was used without any review/clean-up. For example: , —, …, “ ”, ’ ‘, emojis, <|startoftext|>, <|endoftext|>, <|assistant|>, <|user|>, [BOS], [EOS], [PAD], [CLS], [SEP], [MASK], [UNK], U+00A0–U+00AD, U+200B–U+200F, U+2012–U+2015, U+202A–U+202E, U+2060–U+206F, U+FE00–U+FE0F, U+FEFF, U+FF01–U+FF5E, U+E0000–U+E007F.
elcapitan 9mo ago
I wonder if thereis a good explanation why emojis have had such an overproportional impact on LLM output. The em dashes I get, they are quite typical for formal writing, but I have never seen many examples of emoji-littered documents outside of LLM output or chatrooms before. Maybe I'm just out of touch with some corners of the Internet that this was trained on.

jasonsb 9mo ago

> Anyone who has had to clean up AI comments riddled with stupid emojis from their code will understand this. I have no idea what you're talking about. I code daily, with 80/90% of my work AI-assisted, and never had to clean one emoji. As for emojis appearing in EHRs, a more likely explanation is the growing presence of Gen Z professionals in healthcare, who are known for integrating emojis into their communication. This trend probably has little to do with AI and more to do with generational habits.

zenethian 9mo ago
I just had Claude generate a readme for me and it added at least 10 emoji to it.
- kevin_thibedeau 9mo ago
  That's where they are prevalent. It's just mimicking its training set. If you use LLMs as Q&A oracles or code generators the emoji output is less frequent.
nnnnico 9mo ago
> I code daily, with 80/90% of my work AI-assisted, and never had to clean one emoji. do you read this code? I find it hard to believe unless you have llm instructions in your codebase that you are not aware of
- Wowfunhappy 9mo ago
  Claude (the only model I use regularly) will definitely add emojis to non-code documentation and/or commit messages (which I almost never let it write, but it will sometimes try). However, I can't recall Claude ever adding emoji to code or in comments.
  - zem 9mo ago
    it has added emoji to shell script status output for me (green ticks, red crosses, etc)
    - Wowfunhappy 9mo ago
      Oh, yes it will do that sort of thing, I forgot about that. I don't think I mind in that context?
- jasonsb 9mo ago
  I always read and review the code and it's true that the old models from 2023/2024 were using a lot of emojis. But that code was garbage. Since LLMs have started to write decent code, I haven't seen one emoji.
RicoElectrico 9mo ago
In the conversational mode it shits them like crazy. Depends on a particular fine-tune though.
bpt3 9mo ago
Gen Z has been entering the professional workforce (post college age) since approximately 2020, so I don't think they're to blame. AI generated text is littered with emojis in my experience as well, often used as bullets in the lists it loves to generate.
kube-system 9mo ago
I don't think an 8x spike over a year would be in any way explained by a demographic shift. I think your personal experiences are anecdotal, unique, and not representative of EHR users.
- jasonsb 9mo ago
  Well, it is. Let's say that AI adds emojis to my code/text. Me, a millennial who hates emojis, will tell the AI to delete those emojis and never use them again in my code or my official documents. The gen Z guy who got his first job last week will love to keep them.
  - VanTheBrand 9mo ago
    Most people using LLMs wouldn’t even know you could tell it not to produce emoji. You are thinking about this like a coder not like a doctor.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - johnisgood 9mo ago
      If you can tell it instructions, and you know you can tell it instructions, then how smart do you have to be to realize that "omit emojis" is an instruction you can use? If what you said is true, I have no hope...
    - supriyo-biswas 9mo ago
      There’s an option in ChatGPT’s settings to lessen the use of emojis. Though most people never bother to change the default setting and I didn’t know of it myself until recently.
  - 0x1ch 9mo ago
    I'm Gen Z, also an engineer. I wouldn't bother removing them from the comments, but I wouldn't add them myself lol.
nonethewiser 9mo ago
Emojis are not widely used on platforms that dont make them easy to add. IE medical software on windows. >I have no idea what you're talking about. I code daily, with 80/90% of my work AI-assisted, and never had to clean one emoji. Yeah because they dont just add them to any generated code. Although if you ask them to make some sort of UI that might involve graphics, they will happily add lots of emojis. They do add them very liberally, especially in headings, for writing articles, blog posts, repots etc.
RajT88 9mo ago
I use AI daily and have to clean emojis. It depends on the task, or the particular product/agent you're using. ChatGPT is a lot more emoji-heavy than say the business Copilot. Claude code, never. GitHub copilot never. What I can tell you is, people I know who are SME's who are being paid several hundred thousand dollars a year this past year have started just copypastaing my questions into an LLM and regurgitating back to me whatever they said. From my friend who is a director of a medical research library, a huge number of doctors recently switched from googling shit to just running it through the free ChatGPT.
zahlman 9mo ago
> I have no idea what you're talking about. I code daily, with 80/90% of my work AI-assisted, and never had to clean one emoji. Compare the READMEs of GitHub repositories for low-rated Show HN submissions in 2025 vs 2024. It's really clear.
tamimio 9mo ago
> I have no idea what you're talking about. I code daily, with 80/90% of my work AI-assisted, and never had to clean one emoji. It depends on what you ask it. Asking it to code won't generate a single emoji, but ask it to make a list, summarize something, and similar tasks and you will have it all over. And I disagree with people who always try to stick whatever to "generational stuff" as if there's a distinct wall with total culture differences, plus assuming XYZ gen is a monolith to apply whatever label on. I think this is just an easy, lazy way to explain things that you couldn't understand or explain. Sure, you might have some differences between a 13-year-old and 55-year-old in some categories, but they still share a lot of common ground as well. But a 20-something and 30-something? Barely any difference, let alone at work where usually there are policies and whatnot that will restrict such differences from surfacing.
CJefferson 9mo ago
It must be different AIs. I grade student work, and I see a lot of Python generated by AI. I don't know exactly which AI, but about a third of the work I see is littered with emojis.

nonethewiser 9mo ago

>Emoji use was stable from 2020-2024, then spiked in 2025. That's from the article? Yeah I think there should be pretty much no doubt about that.

randycupertino 9mo ago

I have some coworkers who use AI in place of the bullets in bulleted lists and I don't hate it. It's fun and eye-catching and brings some novelty to our scientific work. One uses science themed emojis (he's a cardiologist so lots of cardiac hearts, test tubes and DNA emojis) and another uses custom-mojis that she designed after Piet Mondrian's art. I've also seen emojis popping up in official meeting minutes which is fine too. Why not spice it up with some whimsy.

freehorse 9mo ago
> brings some novelty to our scientific work Is this satire? I hope it is. Otherwise it seems like a sorry state that science currently is if it needs emojis to bring some novelty into it.
- randycupertino 9mo ago
  Heh, I didn't intend it to be satire. When you spend 7 hours a day cleaning data, sending queries to research sites and doing patient profile review emojis spice it up and can be eye-catching and fun. Why not? I generally don't use them in routine practice but when I see some of my straight-laced coworkers strategically deploy them I don't hate it!
- goodmythical 9mo ago
  Jesus, my dude, lighten up a bit. Consider this: You're a grad student who's been reading page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page of lack and white text. How is marking a particularly explosive comment with a graphic representation of an explosion any different from highlighting it? Or from Davinci's marginal scribbles? or from Feynman's wave diagrams? Or, for that matter, simply bolding, italicizing, or underlining it? Shit, why even format it at all? Who needs page breaks and indented paragraphs in something as serious as a scientific paper? God forbid we ever go so far as to implement more than one font. Changes to the methods by which we communicate are made on a regular basis. If people find them useful enough to put them in their own communications, and they do not harm the clarity of the transmission, who are we (or you in particular) to cry about it on the sidelines? You remind me of the person in the back of the room trying to invalidate a proof based on a misspelling that in no way impacts the validity of the proof. As if adding an emoji somehow invalidates the months or years of work that went in to producing the content that you are consuming at no cost and will likely benefit from without having contributed to the project in any meaningful way. I mean, seriously. Imagine someone's finally created a genuine cure for all cancers. They've spent the entire lives of hundreds of people and billions of dollars, and oh no! What's this? Aww, damn there's an emoji in one of the graphs. Damn. Too bad, I guess it's not going to be good enough for freehorse. Better go ahead and send it back for revisions. Can't publish it like that. Not now, not ever. Curing cancer's going to have to wait until we can force the author of this paper to conform to our arbitrary preferences.

ks2048 9mo ago

I’ve wondered why GenAI text has so many emojis, for example in README.md bullet points. I guess their RLHF data had it? On purpose? And various labs all the same? Because if they were just learning from web data (pre- a few years ago), this didn’t seem to be very prevalent.

airstrike 9mo ago
reddit
- lotsofpulp 9mo ago
  Sprinkling in some reaction gifs would be helpful.
GaryBluto 9mo ago
It's to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
rvnx 9mo ago
The emojis and similar style is because models are learning from other models, as it is the easiest way to have RLHF data. Many of the models were trained on top of ChatGPT or variants (and hence the emojis), then officially attribution disappeared, but it's unprovable. This process is called distillation. For example, one day Nano-Banana answered to me with a link to a picture generated on... FAL platform (that did not exist). DeepSeek: https://i.redd.it/7nkucg2qelfe1.png https://i.redd.it/7nkucg2qelfe1.png Anthropic Claude: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1e34tkr/why_is_claude_35_sonnet_referring_to_itself_as/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1e34tkr/why_is_clau... Grok: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/GA8PGGSWYAE726-.jpeg https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/GA8PG... Gemini-Flash-Lite, if you squeeze it a bit: > I must state clearly: I am a large language model, trained by OpenAI. This is the core definition of ChatGPT. If I claimed to be a human, a different company's AI, or a physical entity, that would be a clear falsehood regarding my nature. but most has been fixed since Gemini 1.5-Pro Over time this is fading because now they have their own trained output, and all these companies actively replace references to OpenAI, and distilled, mixed with other training data, their own, cleaned up, distilled, so the source text disappeared. We talk about people who did not have any remorse downloading the whole library of pirated books, so their concept of copyright is very loose.

flexagoon 9mo ago

Why would it be 2025 though? LLM popularity happened a few years earlier

NewJazz 9mo ago
Adoption by health companies?

greenacred 9mo ago

elcapitan 9mo ago

I wonder if thereis a good explanation why emojis have had such an overproportional impact on LLM output. The em dashes I get, they are quite typical for formal writing, but I have never seen many examples of emoji-littered documents outside of LLM output or chatrooms before. Maybe I'm just out of touch with some corners of the Internet that this was trained on.