Language is becoming visual. Emoji, stickers, and GIFs are exploding in popularity, despite the fact that it’s still labour-intensive to use them in an advanced way.

Or perhaps the medium we're communicating in lacks the context and nuance we use to communicate beyond words-on-screen and we're all bastardizing our way to mutually-agreed compensation.

I'd be interested to hear the argument that emoji increase the clarity of communication rather than the affinity. It's fun to intersperse them, and it serves to reinforce the in-group nature of your conversation, but I'm unaware of any language that progressed from alphabetic to pictographic representation.

if you write “Kanye is the”, Dango will predict the 🐐 emoji .

Yes, that's clever. but "Kanye is the goat" is an in-joke reliant on a specific subset of knowledge and not easily used to communicate new ideas or specific instructions or thoughts.

Pizza rat 🐭 🍕 ayy lmao 👽

Sure. And my bitmoji will still let me do this:

It's an accomplishment that a neural net can correctly predict the meme that goes with your text. But until that neural net can teach you new memes (beyond going "wtf does an alien have to do with ayyylmao") it isn't our language becoming visual.