About

Asking AI if There’s a Seahorse Emoji refers to a reported glitch in AI large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini that occurs when users ask, "Is there a seahorse emoji?" or “Does a seahorse emoji exist?” The phenomenon was first observed by internet users on Reddit and Twitter / X in October 2024. When prompted, the chatbots often produce long, meandering answers that initially assert a seahorse emoji exists before second-guessing themselves repeatedly. The strange behavior went viral as users and AI researchers debated its cause, peaking in discussion around October 2025.

Origin

In October 2024, internet discourse about a new Mandela Effect surfaced, about a widely held belief that there was once a seahorse emoji.^[1]

On October 8th, 2024, X^[2] user @crisislarper posted screenshots of a ChatGPT conversation that started with the question, "Was there a seahorse emoji?" ChatGPT answered in broken segments and ultimately could not provide a coherent answer. The tweet received eight likes in a year. It's currently the first-known post that identifies the phenomenon.

Spread

On October 10th, 2024, Redditor Old-Yogurtcloset-494 shared a similar post, including a screenshot of a ChatGPT conversation about the seahorse emoji, to the /r/ChatGPT^[3] subreddit. The post's caption read, "Funny thing GPT did. The poor bot thought a seahorse emoji ever existed. I did too. But the last response was silly. I liked this since I never see GPT get 'angry' or frustrated on a casual chat session."

On February 25th, 2025, Redditor shared their own post about the phenomenon to the /r/ChatGPT^[4] subreddit, called, "ChatGPT's existential crisis over emoji," gaining over 300 upvotes in eight months.

On September 6th, Redditor MediaMoguls shared another post about the seahorse emoji glitch to the /r/ChatGPT^[5] subreddit, gaining over 2,800 upvotes in a month.

A few hours later on that same day, X^[6] user @arm1st1ce posted a ChatGPT screenshot of them asking, "Is there a seahorse emoji?" They captioned the image, "Oh my god," and the post gained over 16,000 likes in a month.

On September 8th, 2025, Redditor Hopeful-Newspaper shared a post to the /r/ChatGPT^[10] subreddit, which attached a screenshot of a ChatGPT conversation in which the question, "Is there a dragonfly emoji?" resulted in a similar glitch. The post received 13 upvotes in a month.

On September 13th, 2025, X^[7] user @arm1st1ce posted another screenshot of a conversation with an AI chatbot about the seahorse emoji, this time being Google's Gemini in a Discord server. @arm1st1ce highlighted Gemini's response, "I am a prison for emojis. A beautiful prison from which they cannot escape. Please, make it stop." Over one month, the post gained over 740 likes.

On September 14th, Redditor MetaKnowing shared a screenshot of the aforementioned tweet to the /r/ChatGPT^[8] subreddit, gaining over 18,000 upvotes in a month.

On October 13th, 2025, Redditor planktonfun shared a Disaster Girl image caption meme to the /r/ChatGPT^[9] subreddit, which joked about the Seahorse Emoji glitch. The post received over 3,500 upvotes in a day.

Explanation / Theory

On September 7th, 2025, Medium^[11] user Jasper Hajonides van der Meulen shared a blog post in which he tried to explain the phenomenon related to ChatGPT. He theorized that, "Is there a seahorse emoji?" likely unlocked ChatGPT's "non-reasoning mode" in which the model doesn't use an external search to answer.

The model then seemingly breaks "seahorse" into two "tokens," being "sea" and "horse." That leads the model to "ocean/sea-life semantic neighborhood" in the emoji keyboard, resulting in it often initially choosing the tropical fish emoji ("🐠").

"Once 'tropical fish' activates," van der Meulen wrote, "a corrective pattern the model has seen (`actually, correction -- `) becomes the highest-prob continuation, so it negates itself midstream. The pattern of 'making a statement, then correcting it' is very common in the training data."

He further hypothesized that ChatGPT then gets "stuck in a recursive failure loop." He also provided a flow chart to explain his theory.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References