OpenAI has just announced several updates to its flagship conversational AI model, ChatGPT, and among them is a up-to-date app and interface that features a up-to-date user-facing system personality: a giant black dot.
On stage at OpenAI’s spring event, CTO Mira Murati alluded to the changes: “We know these models are becoming more and more complex, but we want the interaction experience to become more natural, easier, and for you to not focus on the UI at all.”
For this purpose, the up-to-date interface is a dot, a hole, or a circle – however you choose to view it.
In a way, this is a positive and decisive change, a nod to the minimalism that Apple once practiced. And while the bubbly, saccharine voice is another disturbing step towards pseudodanthropy, at least it doesn’t have an eerie face.
The black dot changes to a stylized wave when ChatGPT speaks, just as the tooltip area changes to a dot when the user speaks. It subtly reinforces the idea of conversation and collaboration while hiding the internal machinery. They wisely chose not to turn the dot into a giant eye that watches you as you employ its video analytics capabilities. Instead, it shows a live image of what it “sees.”
In another sense, you’re probably not alone in what this circle in a rectangle reminds you of:
Of course, OpenAI is not the first to exploit this motif in artificial intelligence in the long run. Apple’s Siri has long been round, as has its eponymous artificial intelligence, Meta. So let’s not read too far. (For the record, Google chose the spark for Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude remains incorporeal.)
However, the stark geometric aesthetic is taken to the extreme here and is a combination of shapes that, like it or not, will always be associated with the domineering artificial intelligence of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. (When ChatGPT can read lips, we’ll know we’re involved.)
You can also think of the dot as a hole in the block for media and knowledge: all the images and text in the world compressed into a very dense ball from which no information about the training data (except for court documents) can escape.
Joking and over-analyzing aside, the decision to go monochromatic was probably a wise one, considering the candy-colored alternatives that seem to want to dazzle and comfort you. The black dot is neutral and versatile – adding up-to-date capabilities and iconography to indicate what it does is basic and easily recognizable. Apart from the inevitably sinister connotation of a gaping black maw, this is a good move by the brand.
You’ll soon see the up-to-date dot interface in desktop and mobile apps, although the web interface doesn’t employ it yet.
