Year: 2026
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Climate change and language: An anthology of blog posts
I have been interested in climate change and climate change communication for a long time, most recently as part of a Leverhulme Trust funded ‘Making Science Public’ programme of research (2012-2018). As part of this programme, we established a blog: the ‘Making Science Public’ blog. Since then, I have been blogging about climate change language…
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Between bricks and blobs: The SpudCell
I have been observing advances in synthetic biology from 2010 onwards when I began to chart how that new discipline constructed a new language for itself ‘brick by metaphorical brick’. That was the time of BioBricks and speculations about building synthetic cells ‘from scratch’. Now, some two decades later, we have gone from ‘bricks’ to…
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Synthetic Biology and Language: An anthology
The blog posts assembled here were inspired by working on two projects. Between 2014 and 2016 I was part of a Synthetic Biology Research Centre project funded by the BBSRC focusing on bringing responsible research and innovation or RRI to synthetic biology at the University of Nottingham. We focused on the issue of ‘responsible language…
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From copilot to co-existence: Changes in human-AI interactions
I have written a lot about the metaphors we use to talk about generative AI, but for some reason, one obvious and deep-rooted metaphor has flown under my radar: ‘copilot’ or ‘co-pilot’. It is so ubiquitous that it is easy to overlook. In this post I want to rectify that situation and examine how the…
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Cancelled due to extreme heat
I was going to cancel this week’s post due to the heat — then I noticed I wasn’t alone. We are currently living or rather sweating through the second heatwave this year. It’s really quite bad. There is talk about heat domes and wet bulbs, new climate words that I have been talking about over…
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Making Sense of AI: An anthology of language, metaphor and public understanding
Over the last decade, between May 2016 and May 2026, I have written about 50 blog posts about AI and metaphor spanning a large variety of topics, from recording emerging metaphors, describing shifts and changes in metaphors and discussing their impacts on science and society. I have now sorted these posts into categories so that…
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Stochastic flock: A new AI metaphor
Everyone who has anything to do with chatbots, generative AIs or LLMS knows about the ‘stochastic parrot’, a metaphor created by Emily Bender and colleagues in 2021. It sits on its perch and looks sternly at developers and users of these new computer technologies. At least everybody pretends to know it, because ordinary people don’t…
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Polysemy, pragmatics and puppetry: What AI can learn from ethnomethodology
I recently wrote a blog post in which I summarised some research on the topic of multiple meanings and AI against the backdrop of an old paper of mine on ‘ambiguities we live by’, published in 2001 in the Journal of Pragmatics. Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics that studies how language is used in…
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AI literacy and the case for polysemy awareness
I have recently written two posts on the issue of multiple meanings, polysemy and ambiguity, in AI discourse. When chatting with various people interested in AI metaphors, which has so far been my research focus, I realised that we all had neglected the topic of polysemy, or the multiple meanings that words have in a…
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‘Fake’: From murky origins to murky future
On 2 February 2024 I wrote a post entitled “Truth, post-truth and post-fake”. I started the post like this: “I was sitting at my desk trying to think about something I could blog about. For some reason the word ‘truth’ popped into my head. After that I … messed about on the news database Nexis, rummaged…