Maybe not AI, but that arm lands with what looks amazingly like a standard puff of CGI dust.

Excellent point! That pushes the timeline back even further.

I’d say they were already very common in online chatrooms long before cellphones were widely adopted. They just translated really well to the poor typing options, character limits, and per-message billing of the time so became more widely adopted (and some new shorthand created).

PAWG

Uhh