You’ve seen the sparkle. The little four-pointed star that now adorns AI buttons in Google Search, Photoshop, Samsung phones, Microsoft Word, and dozens of other products. It’s everywhere — and according to a New Zealand writer, that’s not an accident.
In an opinion piece published in The Spinoff on 24 August, guest writer Soph Jackson argues the sparkle is a deliberate branding choice designed to make AI feel magical rather than mechanical. The argument is worth taking seriously, because it gets at something the technical AI debate often misses: how the technology is sold, not just what it does.
The Magic Framing
Jackson’s case is that the sparkle taps into a deep cultural association with magic, nostalgia, and the unknowable. Think Tinkerbell, the genie from Aladdin, Sailor Moon. Magic, in these stories, asks us not to look too closely. It asks for faith.
“With magic, we are not invited to look closer,” Jackson writes. “We are encouraged to let the magic exist; to have faith in what we see, without explanation.”
The parallel to AI marketing is sharp. The companies pushing AI products don’t want users thinking about the mass scraping of copyrighted work that built the training data, or the energy consumption of data centres, or the human biases embedded in model outputs. They want users to see the sparkle and feel wonder.
Jackson spotted a Samsung billboard in Mount Eden, Auckland, that read simply: “Let AI do your jobs.” That’s the convenience pitch in four words. The implication — that you should want to outsource your daily decisions to a machine — goes unquestioned.
Why the Symbol Matters
It would be easy to dismiss this as an aesthetic quibble. It isn’t. The EU’s AI Act transparency requirements, which came into force this month, are built on the premise that people have a right to know when they’re interacting with AI. The sparkle does the opposite. It softens the interaction, makes it feel friendly, turns a computational tool into something that twinkles.
There’s a gap between what AI is — a statistical model trained on other people’s data — and what the branding suggests it is: a creative partner, a wise guide, a magical assistant. That gap is where a lot of the public confusion about AI lives. People who see the sparkle and think “magic” are less likely to question the output, check the source, or push back when an AI system produces something biased, wrong, or harmful.
Jackson’s framing echoes a concern that has surfaced in our coverage of AI transparency rules: the gap between how AI is marketed and how it actually works is itself a societal risk. When the marketing invokes magic, the gap widens.
The NZ Context
The Spinoff is one of New Zealand’s most widely read independent media outlets. That a piece this critical of AI marketing ran there — on the front page, no less — signals something about the local mood. New Zealand has been relatively cautious on AI. The Human Rights Commission called for a human rights-centred, Te Tiriti-based approach to AI earlier this month. The AI Forum’s refreshed Blueprint for Aotearoa, published in May, emphasised responsible and inclusive AI over speed.
Jackson’s piece fits that temperament. It’s not anti-technology. It’s anti-obfuscation. The complaint isn’t that AI exists. It’s that AI is being dressed up as something it isn’t, and the dressing-up has consequences.
The Frankenstein reference at the end of the piece is pointed. Jackson draws a line from Mary Shelley’s novel — where the creator recoils from what he’s made — to the current moment, where AI companies package their products in sparkle imagery and ask us to trust them. “We are supposed to learn to distrust ourselves, to put faith in these mysterious machines instead,” Jackson writes.
The Counter-Argument
The defence of the sparkle is simple: it’s just an icon. User interfaces need visual cues, and a sparkle communicates “AI feature” more efficiently than a label. Not every design choice is an ideological statement.
That’s partially true. But Jackson’s point is about accumulation. When every major tech company adopts the same symbol — Google, Samsung, Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Notion, Canva — the symbol stops being a neutral indicator. It becomes a shared visual language that normalises AI as magic. The uniformity is the tell. These companies don’t coordinate on much, but they coordinate on this.
What Stands Out
What makes Jackson’s piece worth reading isn’t the novelty of the critique. Scholars and designers have questioned the sparkle for a couple of years. What stands out is the specificity. A Samsung billboard in Mount Eden. The Matariki reference. The connection between the sparkle and the concept of a guiding star in Polynesian navigation. The piece is grounded in a New Zealand reading of a global phenomenon, and that’s exactly the kind of local lens that international coverage misses.
It also raises a question that the AI industry has not adequately answered: if your product is as good as you say it is, why does the branding need to make it look like magic? Tools that work don’t need enchantment. Hammers don’t sparkle.
