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.

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.

>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.

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

> 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.