My expectation is that the parameter name icon_assistant would not change the icon for user messages.
Reproducible example:
https://shiny.posit.co/py/templates/dinner-recipe/
Here is the link to the code that seems to apply it to all messages:
https://github.com/posit-dev/shinychat/blob/main/pkg-py/src/shinychat/_chat.py#L1776