Live data from Hacker News

Emoji Use in the Electronic Health Record is Increasing

jamanetwork.com

41–50 of 101 posts

Re: Emoji Use in the Electronic Health Record is Increasing

#42

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’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.

Re: Emoji Use in the Electronic Health Record is Increasing

#44
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

Re: Emoji Use in the Electronic Health Record is Increasing

#45

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.

Re: Emoji Use in the Electronic Health Record is Increasing

#46
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.

Re: Emoji Use in the Electronic Health Record is Increasing

#47
post #4

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.

> 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.…

> 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.

Re: Emoji Use in the Electronic Health Record is Increasing

#48
post #42

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’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.

reddit

Re: Emoji Use in the Electronic Health Record is Increasing

#49
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

I just had Claude generate a readme for me and it added at least 10 emoji to it.

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.

Re: Emoji Use in the Electronic Health Record is Increasing

#50
post #42

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’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.

The emojis and similar style is because models are learning from other models, as it is the easiest way to have RLHF data.

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).

    DeepSeek:
https://i.redd.it/7nkucg2qelfe1.png

    Anthropic Claude:
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1e34tkr/why_is_clau...

    Grok:
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/GA8PG...

    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.

Post reply on HN