Feedback is New Scientist’s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com
Blossom? Really?
The past few years have seen the emergence of a great many AI companies. This is extremely exciting/alarming (delete according to whether you bought shares early), but it has also had a secondary consequence. Along with the proliferation of AI companies has come a proliferation of AI company logos.
The fascinating thing, highlighted by several publications, is that many of these logos look near-identical. According to sociologist James I. Bowie, writing for Fast Company in 2023, the trend is for a “stylized hexagon” with an implied rotation. This, he notes, is equally suggestive of “portals opening to wondrous new worlds”, “widening Yeatsian gyres” and “toilets flushing”.
Or we could look at it the way Radek Sienkiewicz, a developer who blogs as VelvetShark, does. Sienkiewicz noted that most of these logos have the following elements: a circular shape, a central opening or focal point, radiating elements from the centre and soft organic curves. This, he says, is an “apt description” of “a butthole“.
Feedback examined the logos of OpenAI, Apple Intelligence, Claude and others, and we can confirm that, yes, they do bear more than a passing resemblance to a sphincter, and once you see it you can’t unsee it. DeepSeek and Midjourney are about the only exceptions: their logos look like a whale and a sailboat on the sea. But maybe they will soon get sucked into the circular logo maelstrom.
Why so many stylised hexagons? Perhaps the whirling patterns are meant to symbolise the recursive nature of thought, the ability of AIs to iteratively improve their understanding of the world.
Not according to OpenAI, though. Its brand guidelines offer a detailed explanation for the company’s logo, which it calls “blossom” to make you think it isn’t a butthole. “At its heart, the logo captures the dynamic intersection between humanity and technology – two forces that shape our world and inspire our work. The design embodies the fluidity and warmth of human-centered thinking through the use of circles, while right angles introduce the precision and structure that technology demands.” Readers are free to make of that what they will.
Personally, Feedback has a working hypothesis about these logos. It involves the psychological phenomenon known as “groupthink”.
Difficult second album
One of Feedback’s favourite genres of knowledge is “things everyone knows, but that have obvious counterexamples that everyone also knows if they just think about it for a second”. Hence, we turned with glee to a study in Psychology of Music about the “sophomore slump”: the supposed tendency for musicians’ second albums to be worse than their debuts, the proverbial difficult second album.
The study was originally published last November but was highlighted by science writer Philip Ball on Bluesky in April – and here we are in May, finally publishing something about it. Feedback is nothing if not tardy.
The research purports to be “the first large-scale multi-study attempt to test… whether a sophomore slump bias exists”. The authors examine over 2000 reviews by critics and over 4000 fan reviews. In both datasets, the ratings of album quality declined over the course of most artists’ careers. But only the critics’ reviews showed “a significant and substantial sophomore slump”.
At this point, the study goes off into a long discussion of why this might be. Could cognitive biases be in play? There’s also “regression to the mean”: a really good debut album is unusual and will tend to get disproportionate attention, but the laws of chance mean the follow-up is unlikely to be as good. Feedback, meanwhile, is reminded of a quote that goes back at least to Elvis Costello in 1981: “You have 20 years to write your first album and you have six months to write your second one.”
The thing is, the sophomore slump is a statistical tendency at best. There are plenty of examples of artists whose second albums were better than their debuts: we thought of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Nirvana just off the top of our head, before our mind drifted to the Beastie Boys, Pixies and Taylor Swift. The responses to Ball’s post contain many more.
Feedback also wonders if the second-album phenomenon is confined to rock and pop music, or if it extends to other, more rarefied genres. Is the sophomore slump also a problem faced by composers of acid jazz or aleatoric music? And if so, how would you tell?
Small-scale smuggling
Executive editor Timothy Revell draws Feedback’s wandering attention to a report from Reuters on 15 April: “Kenyan agents bust plot to smuggle giant ants for sale to foreign insect lovers“. The story explains that four smugglers had been caught trying to traffic thousands of live ants out of Kenya, including giant African harvester ants (Messor cephalotes). This species is apparently much in demand among ant-lovers (formicidaephiles?), and a single queen can fetch almost £100.
This is all very serious and important, but Tim wanted to flag one detail. The story quotes a “source in the ant trade” about the paperwork needed to legally export M. cephalotes from Kenya. This person “asked not to be named” because ant trading and smuggling “is a small world”.
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