Why Purple is Artificial Intelligence’s Colour.

Purple is deeply embedded in our cultures. So why has it become the colour of choice with so many AI tools & brands?

Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

It was in the wee hours, the house quiet, the room lit by the glow of my screens with several AI tools open and a few in tabs on my browser. Something interesting struck me. The dominance of the colour purple, sparkling icons and wands. Why are companies working at the leading edge AI tools, so intently rational, drawing so deeply from the visual language of magic?

The answer I think, may rest deep within our collective response to transformative power an technologies. One that stretches from ancient Phoenician purple dye traders to todays magicians of machine learning.

These design choices, from logos to UI buttons may be a subconscious form of creating what in anthropology is considered “technological charisma” — a way of building a relationship with Artificial Intelligence (AI) that encourages both adoption and experimentation while still providing a sense of magic and wonder.

Then there’s sociologist Emile Durkheim’s idea of “collective representations” — shared symbols that a society creates to help us understand new phenomena, including technologies. The consistency of the use of purple (a symbolic colour), wands, stars and such create collective representations for AI.

Magic, rituals and spiritual elements have played a significant role in the adoption of new technologies going back thousands of years. The Trobriand Islanders had a wondrous system of magic and rituals in their culture and a new technology would have representative colours and rituals around its use. Much like we are considering with AI today.

Using forms of symbolism, developing social norms, rituals and behaviours help give us psychological comfort when faced with uncertainty. We get a sort of framework to create methods of understanding a new technology and we develop language and scripts around it as well. All of this to help give us a sense of control over something we don’t at first understand.

This use of symbolism with regard to digital technologies like AI, creates what I call “technological liminalities.” A sort of liminal space between where the rational and mystical aspects of our human experience converge. We are there with AI now.

Long has purple held a special place in cultures around the world. It is a hard colour to actually make and thus it is scarce, adding to it’s special place in societies. Purple too is a liminal colour, sitting in that space between hot reds and cool blues. This liminality represents the space between humans and machines.

Historically, purple was hard to make, mostly coming from the Phoenician murex snail), thus it was adopted by nobility and elites. Purple is said to be the royal colour. This gives off as a symbol of power and exclusivity. Across many cultures purple plays a role in religions, mysticism and spirituality.

The commonality of the wand and stars across so many AI tools could be seen as what structural anthropologist Claude Lévis-Strauss would call “mediating devices”. An oppositional binary representation between human/machine or known/unknown. These symbols, so familiar to us in the patterns of our lives that they help bridge that gap. They draw upon embedded archetypes that we humans have used for millennia when trying to make sense of transformative powers.

It’s interesting that purple became the colour of AI. There’s no Global Bureau of Artificial Intelligence that benevolently comes up with these things and declares them law. It just sort of happened. No doubt influencing each other through the informal social networking at physical events and online.

In religions and spiritual systems around the world those of rank such as priests, often wear purple gowns and robes. Essentially symbols that represent transformation at a profound level.

In part, I think it shows the subconscious ways in which humans use, to this day, rituals and a sense of mysticism even with the most advanced of technologies. Rituals aren’t always religious either. Your morning and bedtime routines are a form of ritual.

Consider prompt writing, it’s similar to invocation rituals in magic. One must learn a specific way of “talking” to the AI tools. These prompts (invocations) are then collectively shared within small and large online communities.

What we are seeing is, going back to Durkheim again, what he called a “collective effervescence” emerging around AI. A sort of shared emotional experience mediated through the use of familiar magical symbolism deeply rooted in our psyche.

It is as if the technology industry subconsciously resurrected ancient symbolisms to help us navigate the role and place of AI in our societies. This all tells us something quite profound about how, as a species, we are collectively grappling with immense powers, that much like the supernatural powers our ancestors once invoked, today seem to be transcending the boundaries of what it means to be human and how we understand our world.