Long, long ago, in a high-quality documentation portal, I noticed something wonderful—tables full of ticks and crosses.
They were everywhere—support, feature, and license matrices. For example, they told you at a glance whether your SQL Server version was supported.
A Problem Only a Geek Would Notice
To find a problem with these tables, you had to be a geek like me.
Someone who noticed that those ticks and crosses were actually images—not reused properly. The CMS was duplicating images, bloating the page size.
Each time the image was inserted carelessly, it created a new copy, adding a few kilobytes unnecessarily. And there were more issues with consistency across pages.
The Simple Fix
The fix was simple—replace these images with emojis: ✅ for Supported and ❌ for Not Supported.
This small change saved up to hundreds of kilobytes per page.
Then Came ChatGPT
I was really happy—until ChatGPT arrived.
First, people used it. Then they overused it. And soon came the flood of posts crying “ChatGPT!” every time someone used an emoji.
Think About the “P” in ChatGPT
Take a step back and think about what the “P” in ChatGPT stands for.
The “P” is for pre-trained—meaning it was trained on existing text.
This documentation center was perhaps one of the datasets it was trained on, like billions of other webpages.
ChatGPT learned from people like us using emojis. So when the “G” part—Generative—kicks in, it generates those same emojis.
Emojis Aren’t Evil
I get it—overusing emojis can be distracting. But when used well, they can convey a message clearly and quickly.
Pro Tip
You can quickly access emojis with:
- Fn + E on Mac
- Windows + . (period) on Windows
