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.
I’ve wondered why GenAI text has so many emojis, for example in README.md bullet points.
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.
>Emoji use was stable from 2020-2024, then spiked in 2025.
That's from the article? Yeah I think there should be pretty much no doubt about that.
> 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.
I don't think an 8x spike over a year would be in any way explained by a demographic shift.
I think your personal experiences are anecdotal, unique, and not representative of EHR users.
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.
Most people using LLMs wouldn’t even know you could tell it not to produce emoji. You are thinking about this like a coder not like a doctor.
[deleted]
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.
I'm Gen Z, also an engineer. I wouldn't bother removing them from the comments, but I wouldn't add them myself lol.
[flagged]
Because using lol as punctuation indicates gen Y, not gen Z?
I use AI daily and have to clean emojis.
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.
> I code daily, with 80/90% of my work AI-assisted, and never had to clean one emoji.
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
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.
it has added emoji to shell script status output for me (green ticks, red crosses, etc)
Oh, yes it will do that sort of thing, I forgot about that. I don't think I mind in that context?
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.
I just had Claude generate a readme for me and it added at least 10 emoji to it.
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.
Gen Z has been entering the professional workforce (post college age) since approximately 2020, so I don't think they're to blame.
AI generated text is littered with emojis in my experience as well, often used as bullets in the lists it loves to generate.
> 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.
Compare the READMEs of GitHub repositories for low-rated Show HN submissions in 2025 vs 2024. It's really clear.
In the conversational mode it shits them like crazy. Depends on a particular fine-tune though.
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.
The study says exactly that. 41% are templated
> Emojis are shown using the open-source Noto Color Emoji font due to copyright restrictions on other versions.
They say below a chart using the Apple Color Emoji font ^^;
I've noticed the same thing for LinkedIn, etc corporate communications. All of a sudden every CEO and marketing leader is packing them in.
And those stupid stylised "fonts" that create problems for screenreaders by using obscure Unicode characters.
So healthcare workers are using chatgpt to write messages for patients and to summarize appointment notes?
Given what I see at my workplace I can completely believe this.
Why is the maple leaf so commonly used? To mean autumn? Leaves in general? Canadians?
Presumably generally representing leaves turning brown as happena with deciduous trees in autumn?
Weed
I think the herb emoji is more often used to represent cannabis than falling leaves or a maple leaf are.
Adding "No smalltalk and no emojis" to the instructions helps a lot.
Probably, but wanting to use AI for these purposes in the first place correlates strongly with not caring on that level.
I'll remember to ask the chef for no plastic shards in my food too
[deleted]
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.
Agree with your first part. On the second part, what??
Plausible deniability on excluding people for BS reasons I'd guess.
> I don't think emojis should be used at all in health records…
Strike "in health records" and you've nailed it.
There's absolutely no benefit to using them, and there are technical and non-technical issues they can cause.
I don't think you're in the minority, and even if you (we) are, you are still correct.
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.
I’ve wondered why GenAI text has so many emojis, for example in README.md bullet points.
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.
>Emoji use was stable from 2020-2024, then spiked in 2025.
That's from the article? Yeah I think there should be pretty much no doubt about that.
> 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.
I don't think an 8x spike over a year would be in any way explained by a demographic shift.
I think your personal experiences are anecdotal, unique, and not representative of EHR users.
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.
Most people using LLMs wouldn’t even know you could tell it not to produce emoji. You are thinking about this like a coder not like a doctor.
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.
I'm Gen Z, also an engineer. I wouldn't bother removing them from the comments, but I wouldn't add them myself lol.
[flagged]
Because using lol as punctuation indicates gen Y, not gen Z?
I use AI daily and have to clean emojis.
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.
> I code daily, with 80/90% of my work AI-assisted, and never had to clean one emoji.
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
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.
it has added emoji to shell script status output for me (green ticks, red crosses, etc)
Oh, yes it will do that sort of thing, I forgot about that. I don't think I mind in that context?
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.
I just had Claude generate a readme for me and it added at least 10 emoji to it.
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.
Gen Z has been entering the professional workforce (post college age) since approximately 2020, so I don't think they're to blame.
AI generated text is littered with emojis in my experience as well, often used as bullets in the lists it loves to generate.
> 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.
Compare the READMEs of GitHub repositories for low-rated Show HN submissions in 2025 vs 2024. It's really clear.
In the conversational mode it shits them like crazy. Depends on a particular fine-tune though.
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.
The study says exactly that. 41% are templated
> Emojis are shown using the open-source Noto Color Emoji font due to copyright restrictions on other versions.
They say below a chart using the Apple Color Emoji font ^^;
I've noticed the same thing for LinkedIn, etc corporate communications. All of a sudden every CEO and marketing leader is packing them in.
And those stupid stylised "fonts" that create problems for screenreaders by using obscure Unicode characters.
So healthcare workers are using chatgpt to write messages for patients and to summarize appointment notes?
Given what I see at my workplace I can completely believe this.
Why is the maple leaf so commonly used? To mean autumn? Leaves in general? Canadians?
Presumably generally representing leaves turning brown as happena with deciduous trees in autumn?
Weed
I think the herb emoji is more often used to represent cannabis than falling leaves or a maple leaf are.
Adding "No smalltalk and no emojis" to the instructions helps a lot.
Probably, but wanting to use AI for these purposes in the first place correlates strongly with not caring on that level.
I'll remember to ask the chef for no plastic shards in my food too
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.
Agree with your first part. On the second part, what??
Plausible deniability on excluding people for BS reasons I'd guess.
> I don't think emojis should be used at all in health records…
Strike "in health records" and you've nailed it.
There's absolutely no benefit to using them, and there are technical and non-technical issues they can cause.
I don't think you're in the minority, and even if you (we) are, you are still correct.