Emoji use was stable from 2020-2024, then spiked in 2025. The authors don't attempt to explain it, but I bet AI is to blame. Anyone who has had to clean up AI comments riddled with stupid emojis from their code will understand this.
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.
Gemini-Flash-Lite, if you squeeze it a bit:
> I must state clearly: I am a large language model, trained by OpenAI. This is the core definition of ChatGPT. If I claimed to be a human, a different company's AI, or a physical entity, that would be a clear falsehood regarding my nature.
but most has been fixed since Gemini 1.5-Pro
Over time this is fading because now they have their own trained output, and all these companies actively replace references to OpenAI, and distilled, mixed with other training data, their own, cleaned up, distilled, so the source text disappeared.
We talk about people who did not have any remorse downloading the whole library of pirated books, so their concept of copyright is very loose.
> 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.
Well, it is. Let's say that AI adds emojis to my code/text. Me, a millennial who hates emojis, will tell the AI to delete those emojis and never use them again in my code or my official documents. The gen Z guy who got his first job last week will love to keep them.
I've noticed coworkers starting to use them in communication (emails, Teams chats, meeting minutes) so now maybe I see others doing it I feel it is fun and acceptable and might throw some in too. I wouldn't put them in code or EDC or any source documentation but an email sure why not.
I did have a scientist recently write a list of lab best practices and before he wrote the list he had a note "Follow instructions below" and then he had a finger pointing DOWN emoji pointing to the list... my work bestie and I actually screenshotted that and sent it to each other and were giggling about it, because he generally is a serious, smart, straight-laced dude and him putting in a garish down facing bright yellow finger emoji just seemed very silly compared to his personality. But it caught our attention and ensured we both read his list!
I would say the uptick is also partly responsible from people using their phones more often during work communication, if he sent that email from his phone instead of his computer it was easier to throw in an emoji to emphasize his important list.
Most people are not anything like anyone on this website. But even if your personal opinions were universally shared, there is no way that what you are suggesting could even be mathematically possible. Gen-Z, being 15 years wide, enters the workforce at approximately 7% per year.
There were not ~800% more gen-z healthcare workers in 2025 than there were in 2024.
It depends on the task, or the particular product/agent you're using. ChatGPT is a lot more emoji-heavy than say the business Copilot. Claude code, never. GitHub copilot never.
What I can tell you is, people I know who are SME's who are being paid several hundred thousand dollars a year this past year have started just copypastaing my questions into an LLM and regurgitating back to me whatever they said.
From my friend who is a director of a medical research library, a huge number of doctors recently switched from googling shit to just running it through the free ChatGPT.
Claude (the only model I use regularly) will definitely add emojis to non-code documentation and/or commit messages (which I almost never let it write, but it will sometimes try). However, I can't recall Claude ever adding emoji to code or in comments.
I always read and review the code and it's true that the old models from 2023/2024 were using a lot of emojis. But that code was garbage. Since LLMs have started to write decent code, I haven't seen one emoji.
That's where they are prevalent. It's just mimicking its training set. If you use LLMs as Q&A oracles or code generators the emoji output is less frequent.
Emojis are not widely used on platforms that dont make them easy to add. IE medical software on windows.
>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.
Yeah because they dont just add them to any generated code. Although if you ask them to make some sort of UI that might involve graphics, they will happily add lots of emojis. They do add them very liberally, especially in headings, for writing articles, blog posts, repots etc.
> 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.
It depends on what you ask it. Asking it to code won't generate a single emoji, but ask it to make a list, summarize something, and similar tasks and you will have it all over.
And I disagree with people who always try to stick whatever to "generational stuff" as if there's a distinct wall with total culture differences, plus assuming XYZ gen is a monolith to apply whatever label on. I think this is just an easy, lazy way to explain things that you couldn't understand or explain. Sure, you might have some differences between a 13-year-old and 55-year-old in some categories, but they still share a lot of common ground as well. But a 20-something and 30-something? Barely any difference, let alone at work where usually there are policies and whatnot that will restrict such differences from surfacing.
I wonder if some portion of these come from templates. Maybe there's a patient communication template that includes a telephone emoji, and it gets reused.
Health care workers are in a hurry when writing notes, so I doubt they're consulting their emoji pickers just to make their notes more interesting.
AI is to be blamed, you can tell a content was mostly written by an AI when every category had emojis all over. The concerning part however, now we have a strong indicator that healthcare is relying on AI slop, and I don’t know why do we still pay them high wages or at least, why there’s a “shortage” of the workers.
Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I don't think emojis should be used at all in health records… It reminds me of stories my mum would tell me about when she would get a résumé pre-digital, and there would be a mark/symbol on it, and it might meant the person is fat, black, wears glasses, etc...
In the article they state "We found that emojis were sent in portal messages to patients aged 70 to 79 years at the second highest rate, after those aged 10 to 19 years" which implies some of this at least is in messages to patients.
I can see sending emojis as a way of trying to be friendly and informal in communications with patients, especially if the patients have already used them.
Patients are all different so I can see some of them hating their use, but I can also see some patients appreciating a more lighthearted tone.
Pediatrics in particular is full of this kind of stuff in general.
I've also seen emojis popping up in official meeting minutes which is fine too. Why not spice it up with some whimsy.
Is this satire? I hope it is. Otherwise it seems like a sorry state that science currently is if it needs emojis to bring some novelty into it.
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.
Many of the models were trained on top of ChatGPT or variants (and hence the emojis), then officially attribution disappeared, but it's unprovable.
This process is called distillation.
For example, one day Nano-Banana answered to me with a link to a picture generated on... FAL platform (that did not exist).
https://i.redd.it/7nkucg2qelfe1.png https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1e34tkr/why_is_clau... https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/GA8PG... but most has been fixed since Gemini 1.5-ProOver time this is fading because now they have their own trained output, and all these companies actively replace references to OpenAI, and distilled, mixed with other training data, their own, cleaned up, distilled, so the source text disappeared.
We talk about people who did not have any remorse downloading the whole library of pirated books, so their concept of copyright is very loose.
That's from the article? Yeah I think there should be pretty much no doubt about that.
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.
I think your personal experiences are anecdotal, unique, and not representative of EHR users.
I did have a scientist recently write a list of lab best practices and before he wrote the list he had a note "Follow instructions below" and then he had a finger pointing DOWN emoji pointing to the list... my work bestie and I actually screenshotted that and sent it to each other and were giggling about it, because he generally is a serious, smart, straight-laced dude and him putting in a garish down facing bright yellow finger emoji just seemed very silly compared to his personality. But it caught our attention and ensured we both read his list!
I would say the uptick is also partly responsible from people using their phones more often during work communication, if he sent that email from his phone instead of his computer it was easier to throw in an emoji to emphasize his important list.
There were not ~800% more gen-z healthcare workers in 2025 than there were in 2024.
It depends on the task, or the particular product/agent you're using. ChatGPT is a lot more emoji-heavy than say the business Copilot. Claude code, never. GitHub copilot never.
What I can tell you is, people I know who are SME's who are being paid several hundred thousand dollars a year this past year have started just copypastaing my questions into an LLM and regurgitating back to me whatever they said.
From my friend who is a director of a medical research library, a huge number of doctors recently switched from googling shit to just running it through the free ChatGPT.
do you read this code? I find it hard to believe unless you have llm instructions in your codebase that you are not aware of
>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.
Yeah because they dont just add them to any generated code. Although if you ask them to make some sort of UI that might involve graphics, they will happily add lots of emojis. They do add them very liberally, especially in headings, for writing articles, blog posts, repots etc.
AI generated text is littered with emojis in my experience as well, often used as bullets in the lists it loves to generate.
Compare the READMEs of GitHub repositories for low-rated Show HN submissions in 2025 vs 2024. It's really clear.
It depends on what you ask it. Asking it to code won't generate a single emoji, but ask it to make a list, summarize something, and similar tasks and you will have it all over.
And I disagree with people who always try to stick whatever to "generational stuff" as if there's a distinct wall with total culture differences, plus assuming XYZ gen is a monolith to apply whatever label on. I think this is just an easy, lazy way to explain things that you couldn't understand or explain. Sure, you might have some differences between a 13-year-old and 55-year-old in some categories, but they still share a lot of common ground as well. But a 20-something and 30-something? Barely any difference, let alone at work where usually there are policies and whatnot that will restrict such differences from surfacing.
Health care workers are in a hurry when writing notes, so I doubt they're consulting their emoji pickers just to make their notes more interesting.
They say below a chart using the Apple Color Emoji font ^^;
Given what I see at my workplace I can completely believe this.
I can see sending emojis as a way of trying to be friendly and informal in communications with patients, especially if the patients have already used them.
Patients are all different so I can see some of them hating their use, but I can also see some patients appreciating a more lighthearted tone.
Pediatrics in particular is full of this kind of stuff in general.
Strike "in health records" and you've nailed it.
I don't think you're in the minority, and even if you (we) are, you are still correct.