Category: Language
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Polysemy, power and ethics in AI discourse
I recently saw a paper by Travis LaCroix, Fintan Mallory and Sasha Luccioni entitled ‘Strategic polysemy in AI discourse: A philosophical analysis of language, hype, and power’ which immediately attracted my attention as I had worked on ambiguity and polysemy in the distant past. I am now working on metaphors used in and for AI but I…
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Sandboxes and moats: Wrestling with AI metaphors
After this morning’s (17 April 2026) news reports, most of you will know about the furore surrounding the non-release of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos AI model and its implications for cybersecurity (listen to this podcast to get some understanding). Cybersecurity will, however, not be the focus of this post; it will, of course, be metaphors. The…
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‘Habsburg AI’: Portrait of a metaphor and its family
A reader of my blog (yes, there is one!) recently asked me whether I had heard of “Habsburg AI”. To my shame I had not. So, I looked it up and what I found made me think, both about AI and about metaphors for AI. I have been blogging about metaphors for AI for a…
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Is ‘cultural technology’ a metaphor for AI?
This morning, I opened Bluesky and saw a message from Matthew Cobb alerting me to an article in The Observer on “Ten metaphors for AI” by John Naughton. Metaphors for AI, c’est moi, I thought, and indeed in the online version there is a link to one of my posts. Wow. At the same time…
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AI through a bilingual lens: Metaphors in Italian and English
This is a guest post by Barbara Gabriella Renzi and Giulio Napolitano who have just published an article exploring AI metaphors from a bilingual perspective, comparing metaphors in English and Italian. This adds a new dimension to my own work on AI metaphors here on the Making Science Public blog and fills a real gap…
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Vibe-coding spaghetti: Unpacking an AI metaphor for biology
I recently saw a post on Bluesky just saying “Coconuts”. Intriguing! Underneath was a screenshot of a tweet which was even more intriguing. The tweet said: “A techbro told me that biology is easy because DNA is just code, right? I told him that DNA is 4 billion year old, completely undocumented, vibe-coded spaghetti, built…
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Metaphors AIs live by
I wanted to write something about the history of science this week but I’ll postpone that until next week. In this post, I just want to draw your attention to a phenomenon relating to AI and metaphors that is quite intriguing and that I don’t understand, especially since I only use AIs, that is Claude,…
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Metaphors in AI and genomics: Going beyond blueprints and parrots
I have been writing about metaphors in genetics and genomics since 2003 and about metaphors in AI/GenAI/LLMs since 2023. Recently, I started to wonder whether there are any similarities and differences in the nature and use of metaphors between the two fields and whether this has any possible impact on science communication. As usual, I…
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Peptides, wellness and woo: A linguistic analysis
My recent blog posts have mainly dealt with topics focusing on AI and metaphors; but for a while now I wanted to get back to writing something about biology, a field which has fascinated me for a long time. Then I saw an article in The Guardian on an injectable ‘peptide craze’ sweeping the US,…
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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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