Making Science Public: A blog on science, language and culture
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Making and unmaking AI metaphors and magic
Twenty years ago, Noel and Amanda Sharkey, seminal contributors to early AI debates, wrote an article on artificial intelligence and natural magic which deserves to be read again today. They focus on robots and could probably not have foreseen the advances made in the last three years in generative AI, but what they say holds…
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Moltbook: Snapshots of a metaphorical firework
(Now also available as podcast!!) In late January 2026, a social network appeared where only AIs could post and within days, the internet had responded with an explosion of parodies, panic, and metaphors that revealed as much about us as about the bots. In this post I have taken a few snapshots of this mimetic…
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Metaphors for AI: Networks, holes and loops
I have been observing metaphors for generative AI for some time. This does not mean that I understand what’s going on in AI, but they provide me with an illusion of knowledge. They throw a net or mesh of metaphors over the topic that provides something of an epistemological safety net. But sometimes that net…
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AI veganism: A new dietary metaphor for a new type of discourse
A couple of weeks ago, I told my former colleague Sujatha Raman that I was collecting metaphors for AI, such as AI slop for example. She asked: “Have you heard about AI veganism?” I said no, I hadn’t, whereupon she sent me an article from The Guardian and that set me off down a rabbit…
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From metaphors on market day to metaphors we live by
I was talking the other day with some people about AI metaphors. During that discussion the thorny question came up ‘what are metaphors anyway?’, followed by ‘is there anything in language that’s not metaphorical?’. This brought to mind a very old quote. In 1730 the grammarian and philosopher César Chesneau Du Marsais said: “I am…
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“Don’t bang your head on the guardrails”: Geoengineering metaphors, 2026
Sitting on a bus and browsing my timeline on Bluesky on Friday 9 January, I came across a comment by Gaia Vince saying: “Interesting to see the Guardian running a couple sensible opinion pieces on geoengineering recently”. I opened an article she pointed to and immediately saw a juicy metaphor: “In this sense, research acts…
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Timelines we live in: A linguistic investigation
At the beginning of the year, I was browsing my timeline on Bluesky* and came across sentences like this: “The absolute dumbest possible timeline. That’s what we live in.” “I know we all say ‘this is the stupidest timeline’ a lot but seriously this is the stupidest timeline”; “What a sh!tty-ass timeline to live in”;…
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From sloppers to slopocalypse: The lexical productivity of AI slop
At the end of last year, I wrote a blog post in which I dissected the word ‘enshittification’, a staple of AI slang. At the beginning of 2026, I want to do the same for enshittification’s conceptual friend ‘slop’, an indicator of what some call the slopification of AI. As the MIT Technology Review said…
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Metaphorical genres in science communication: From gothic discovery to domestic intervention
I was idly scrolling Bluesky for some news that was not depressing when I chanced upon an article by Roger Highfield dealing with a recent advance in gene editing. It reminded me of two previous posts I had written, one back in 2016 on “Precision metaphors in a messy biological world” and another in which…
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Making Science Public 2025: End-of-year round-up of blog posts
This year has been quite a year! First, I had to move the blog to a new independent home after the University of Nottingham shut down their blogging platform (I wrote two posts about this, one reflecting on the past and one on the future). Second, there was a lot to blog about, from wildfires…
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