A chat with @davidbenque@mastodon.ie about the modern use of the sparkle emoji to signify #AI led me to wonder if there was a good way to track exactly when this trend started.

It then occurred to me that because emojis are just a type of text, usage of sparkles should show up in google trends. Sure enough, it did.

At first I thought we might have passed "peak sparkle", because interest appeared to decline after February, but that seems to be an artifact of having generated the graph halfway through the month of March.