What is the color of artificial intelligence? [closed]

Question

What is the color of artificial intelligence, or the color which represents AI in the eyes of general public?

What is the reason for that? Is there any sociological research on this or related topics?

I'm designing the product which will have AI agent, probably in the form of character. This character will suggest changes to user content (tasks, work items). Changes like: move the task to next stage, link related entities. I'm considering to distinguish this suggestions/changes with color to indicate that this change was made by IA agent but not fellow human. Just to give people a heads-up.

The best insight I have at this point is from 99% Invisible podcast Future screens are mostly blue episode, which is based on Make It So book. I wonder if there anything else any should know.

Answer 1

Color association is highly dependent on context, culture, personal background, industry, upbringing, generation, etc.

I recommend you create some versions and run a simple preference test asking your users what version they associate AI with and why.

As witnessed in the discussion from this answer, meanings and connotations will change depending who you talk to. You want to know what your users think represents AI, and not what this forum's users thinks represents AI.

Answer 2

From Wikipedia:

[...] "artificial intelligence" is used to describe machines that mimic "cognitive" functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as "learning" and "problem solving".

Artificial intelligence is relate to artificial brains. The brain is composed of gray matter.

Grey matter is distributed at the surface of the cerebral hemispheres (cerebral cortex) and of the cerebellum (cerebellar cortex), as well as in the depths of the cerebrum.

Within the range of grays, from dark gray to white, there can be a difference:

Dark greys

The dark colors are related to an uncertain future and harmful to the human race: cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of lowlife and high tech" featuring advanced technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cybernetics, juxtaposed with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order.

• Dark, dirty, inhuman, harmful, dangerous

Light greys

The light grey/white has a relation of the friendly technology with the human being: post-cyberpunk

• Clean, healthy, friendly, mysterious

Cyan

As a color extension of white like in the ice, icebergs or glaciers, avoiding grayish shadows, to make them look cleaner.

Some graphic examples:

Answer 3

I don't think there is a specific color that has generally been declared as the "color of AI".

However, when choosing a color for something, it usually is a good idea to take a step back and think about what the specific term you are trying to visualize represents and pick colors that represent these values the best.

AI is a term that is largely perceived as being:

• futuristic
• progressive
• new
• ever-evolving
• clean
• high-tech

but also as being:

• dangerous
• frightening
• unknown
• cold

Based on this you could choose:

Turquoise or blue. They are likely the most prominent color when it comes to visualizing forward-thinking, communicative and technological concepts. They also represent a sense of security, that might be what you are looking for, as new technologies can be scary, especially when it comes to self-learning computers, that have been hypothesized to being the end of humanity. Likely or not, you will probably not want your logo/icon/brand to represent the downfall of humanity.

Orange. Orange might not feel as futuristic or technological as the previously mentioned colors, but it is a very dynamic, lively young and also communicative color. Neural networks are everchanging and -adapting and can provide many possibilities for the future. AI is based on the concept of finding new connections and learning through them. Orange is a viable choice that can represent all of these things. It also gets rid of the cold and frightening vibe that the concept of AI might radiate to some people and is not being used in a technological context that often, which can make you stand out more easily.

...or something completely different. You might have a different focus on which part of AI you want to stand out the most. The only thing that is important is that the color you are choosing fits to the aspects you have picked to be most relevant.

Another thing worth mentioning might be to use brighter background colors rather than darker ones. Having a black background for instance would enhance the negative associations towards AI, while a white one can give the concept an entirely different optimistic outlook.

Answer 4

Honestly, I feel like this would simply depend on which color you introduce your AI with and then simply keep the theme going.

_source

Of course it should not fall outside the color expectations of people, but I'd say smaller color nuances won't make a big difference. In that I also agree with Nicolas Hung's answer.

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With that being said, searching for "future AI" in Google images results in this:

Nearly all the images feature the same futuristic blue color, which in itself can be taken as an indicator for the general public's color association AI.

Answer 5

The future screens being blue in your link seems like an incidence of the orange and teal phenomenon, especially if you're drawing from media rather than existing user interfaces.

My experience is that terminal green is a more commonly associated colour when it comes to technology and artificial intelligence, based on the simple terminals that existed in the 80s when science fiction was burgeoning.

You can see this reflected in some particular media, especially The Matrix.

This may be an antiquated notion, however - the 80s predate an awful lot of software users, and your use case may prefer cyan.

As an example:

Answer 6

What color is associated with AI?

None. The user should never see it.

What color do you associate with the Youtube algorithm, or the Facebook feed recommendation algorithm? Nothing, because the AI's completely transparent to the user, working away in the background.

Answer 7

Two immediate examples that came to mind were IBM's Watson, the artificial intelligence to compete and win in TV game show Jeopardy, and Leela, an open-source computer chess artificial intelligence based on Google's Deep Mind. Images below:

Although blue was my first thought, one could make an argument for any color. Hal from Kubrik's 2001: A Space Odessey was black and red. Deep Thought as portrayed in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie was bronze-ish gold.

Perhaps a better creative path is choosing a color based in the emotion you want the AI to emulate, blue being calming and contemplative, green being energetic and youthful; red being aggressive and leading; yellow might be sunny and happy, etc. Again, these could be up to interpretation based on culture and context.

Answer 8

Most people's main experience with AI will have been with virtual personal assistants. Two of the big ones, Alexa and Cortana, use blue (which is why I associate blue heavily with AI):

^{Digital Trends}

(On phones/tablets, Alexa still mainly uses this blue.)

^{RCR Wireless}

And then two of the other big ones have other color schemes. Siri's text color is white on dark, and there's always that white rainbow thing at the bottom:

^{Hacker Noon}

Google Home Speakers are, by default, white (like Google).

^{PC Click}

On phones, Google Assistant's black text on white with a Google colored image next to it.

Answer 9

Adobe Color yields this in a search

More dark colors, many dark blue, some violet, some orange, some teal, some snow-white

So I'll opt for two-tone color: Violet with light gray for utopian AI and violet with dark gray for distopian AI.

Answer 10

From someone who works in the data realm, I'd say the color of artificial intelligence is definitely "orange/butter + blue/arctic", at least this is how we have in mind when building our production tools.

These answers the question "What is the color of artificial intelligence", but not the second half "or the color which represents AI in the eyes of general public?"

For example,

Scikit-learn, one of THE most popular data science development kit/package, use those two colors.

On a side note, an extremely commonly used visualization package matplotlib uses blue and orange as the primary and secondary default color. If you print two lines, by default the first line will be blue, the second is orange.

Tensorflow and PyTorch, two of THE most commonly used deep learning framework, use orange-ish as their theme color.

One of THE most popular language for AI programming, Python, use blue and yellow; also the mighty Java uses similar colors.

Some extremely helpful tools, including Kubernetes, Docker, Apache Spark, have similar color schemes. These are the tools on top of my head when building data products.

These tools are so significant (especially python, scikit-learn, tensorflow, pytorch) that you basically cannot do modern data science work without them.

Answer 11

The vision systems of robots in SciFi movies often show a red tinted image and a HUD with white text. This probably indicates they are made for night vision or may hint at infrared vision.

See for example this image of object recognition by the vision system of the T-800:

This image matches some features of current AI systems for image processing quite accurate. You often see the result of image recognition by an AI as overlay showing e.g. the recognized contour like in this image and sometimes the probabilities for different categories are shown as image overlay, too. But most often, the image is shown in its original colors, even when the AI system works on greyscale or extracts its own features from the colors, though.