How Semiotics helps leading AI services to build a positive image for themselves

New Delhi: Two ubiquitous assistive-AI technologies, Google’s AI mode for search and ChatGPT, have come out with campaigns that spotlight the softer, supportive side of assistive AI. Brand communication from both brands foregrounds how they facilitate human connection and deepen the quality of everyday living.

Take Google India’s branded content film, titled “What Colors Feel Like? | Search like Never Before”. 

In Google India’s film, two young parents are on a camping trip with their children. When their blind son asks about the difference between two colours, they want to help him understand the difference in a way he can access. They turn to Google’s AI search mode and find suggestions rooted in touch, texture and scent. The warm sun becomes yellow. Fresh leaves become green. A cold, rushing river becomes blue. 

The tool steps in at a moment when the parents feel unprepared, when the gap between what their abled daughter can experience and what their son cannot confronts them through an unexpected reminder. For a moment, the AI search mode softens the discomfort they feel on realising that, as abled people themselves, they don’t always know how to make the world equally accessible to them.

In the way it is presented, the AI appears as a friendly companion with its own presence on the side. The search results take up the frame and speak for themselves, giving the technology a role that is distinct yet supportive, rather than something that collapses into the user’s own ability or replaces it.

ChatGPT’s recent ad, “Dish with ChatGPT”, works in a much smaller, yet relatable, space. A young man cooks for someone he likes. He wants to stay casual, but still communicate what the dinner means. He searches for a recipe that says, “I like you, but let’s keep it cool”. The dish comes together as a set of subtle signals selected to communicate a feeling he’d rather imply than state. When the two step out of frame, his query and ChatGPT’s response scroll up the screen. The viewer sees how assistive technology played a thoughtful role, shaping the moment’s meaning without taking over.

Here too, the system sits just outside the scene — visible as text, not trying to impersonate human intention. It even uses language that boosts the user’s own confidence, ending with a line like “You got this” that frames the person as capable, not dependent.

Both pieces of brand communication centre signs, signifieds and the process of meaning making. A sign is simply the thing we use to point to something else. A colour, a recipe, even a gesture. The signified is the idea or feeling that sits behind it. Yellow as warmth. A home-cooked meal is an expression of sincere interest.

The semiosphere is the environment where all these signs and meanings live. It is the shared pool of references we draw from when we try to say something or understand something. We are moving through it all the time, mostly without thinking about it.

These brand films show how AI can move through that space more deliberately than we can. Now AI, by navigating the semiosphere on command, pairs its computational strength with human intention. 

When it works well, ideas become easier to express. Feelings become easier to translate. People make better sense of the world because they are no longer limited by what they remember or what they already know.

This is true of assistive AI in most contexts. Here, Google and ChatGPT have highlighted the positive side of it in what seems like a deliberate move to offset the negative reputation these tools often receive. There is a valid worry about AI overshadowing human creativity and reducing opportunities in fields built on expression. The core function stays the same as in the ads: it shortens the path between intention and execution. But in creative work, that shortcut can feel less like support and more like a bypass. What is gained in speed can come at the cost of the process that gives the work its shape.

In branded communication, AI acts as a bridge, helping people reach the experience they want to create while they remain in control. In creative practice, that bridge can skip straight to the outcome. The gradual movement from thought to form collapses into a single query, flattening the very process that makes the result meaningful.

That flattening is where the helpfulness starts to feel harmful. When assistive AI moves too far into the creative act itself, it stops enabling and starts replacing. It shows what is possible, but also what could be lost in the pursuit of constant convenience. 

And this seems to be where perception hinges. Assistive AI is welcomed when it offers access, context or direction, but resisted when it takes over the experience that defines the work. 

The branding strategies from Google and ChatGPT seem aware of this tension — portraying AI as a parallel presence that helps rather than a force that absorbs or overrides the human. The distinction becomes part of the reassurance.

The challenge for these brands is to navigate that line carefully – to stay on the side of facilitation rather than substitution and to keep the human as the one who ultimately shapes the meaning.