Smiling with your eyes
First of all let’s get the obvious out of the way — the eyes make it seem like a friendly robot, signaling this AI is a friendly one. Sora’s AI is a cute little robot that just wants to help you be more creative and is capable of no harm (roll your eyes now, please).
Of course, that’s not the whole story, the eyes have little AI “sparkling” emoji, as we all know this emoji (✨) was intended to signal magical stuff but was hijacked by the AI industry to signal if anything has AI in it. Much like the AI industry highjacked all of our content and scrapped everything humans ever created- they also highjacked the icon to represent it (again, roll your eyes).
This emoji, like all original emojis, was first made by Shigetaka Kurita for SoftBank- a Japanese telecom company. Kurita itself was asked by David Amel (YouTube link) about the usage of this icon for AI features and he didn’t like it. Of course anybody can use any emoji but since its meaning was originally supposed to be something else and the literal father of emojis doesn’t like it, I’ll consider this emoji stolen because they highjacked its meaning.
To bring it back to the Sora icon itself, if we’ll look closely at the eyes we can see that it’s not eyes at all, it’s holes that we can see the background through. What can be the meaning of those “holes for eyes” face, well — first of all let’s explore the most simple answer. A face with holes for eyes is a skull, the eyes decay and we’re left with only the bones.
A skull is obviously a dead person, but it can also refer to pirates because of their flag, known as the Jolly Roger or simply as the “skull and crossbones”. Pirates can mean a few things in the software business, first and the most likely explanation here is a nod to the famous Steve Jobs quote “it’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy”.
The meaning of this quote is that it’s better to explore the unexplored than to act inline — since the discovery of the new will always happen by “pirates”. Steve Jobs apparently felt so strongly about this quote that he did decorate Apple’s offices with the Jolly Roger flag in his first run at Apple.
Of course we’re all thinking about the other explanation of a pirate flag in the software industry and that’s pirated software. Pirated software is what the software industry calls a piece of software that users share among themselves without proper licensing.
That was (and still is) a crime when people did that and some people even got sued or fined for it. But when big companies do that, like OpenAI and other AI companies it’s somehow not a crime and they get to be worth billions of dollars instead. So they do really get to be pirates.
Another popular entity with holes for eyes is the Golem. The Golem is a famous European Jewish myth about a clay creature that becomes alive when a wise rabbi does some magic to awake him. The magic this rabbi is doing is to carve a word into the Golem’s forehead, the word in this instance can be analogous to a prompt the AI needs to do its magic, to become “alive”.
Both AI and the Golem in the story are not really alive but rather have the illusion of being alive. The Jewish tale is meant to be cautionary, the Golem is becoming unstoppable and tries to upstage the rabbi, much like AI is threatening to upstage human workers in many different industries today.
If you don’t like this Jewish parable you can think of The Terminator instead, it’s also a man-made entity that, once built, we lost any control over it. The Terminator again looks like a skull and again has no eyes (only lights, much like the sparkling in Sora’s no-eyes), so it’s a good enough reference, although I prefer the Golem analogy. The Terminator is also regarded as a cautionary tale against the dangers of AI, of course.
