Category: Language
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From the book of life to the internet of biology: Advances in AI and genomics
On 28 October 2026, I read an interesting article by Pallab Ghosh for the BBC in which he dissected the opportunities of advances in generative AI, but, even more so, its dangers for research integrity, truth and trust. These are important topics, but what fascinated me more was how he began his article: “A bank…
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Metaphors as invitations
When researching a blog post on the frontier metaphor in AI discourse, I came across an article from 1980 that I had not seen before. It gave me some good ideas about how to deal with the frontier metaphor, but it also provided some forgotten insights into the nature of metaphor that had parallels with…
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Rogue AI and the resistance toaster
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the counter-metaphors people use to resist the ‘going rogue’ framing of AI: blenders, Glocks, real dogs, robot dogs. I left out the toaster. This is a quick note to rectify this omission! First I read about smart freezers defrosting in French supermarkets after a cyberattack. Then came…
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What’s in a name? Man-made climate, biology and intelligence
On 22 September 2026, at the UN General Assembly, President Trump announced that the United States “totally rejects” any attempt to construct a global scheme to control artificial intelligence, and then did something that no linguist can ignore: he renamed it. “The use of the word artificial makes intelligence sound fake,” he said. “It is…
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Resisting rogue metaphors
Readers of this blog will know that from antiquity onwards, philosophers, rhetoricians and cognitive scientists have examined the use and abuse of metaphors. More recently, they have also begun to investigate how and why people resist or defend the use of metaphors and how they agree or disagree with the use of a metaphors. If…
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From pause to pace: How metaphors frame calls for an AI slowdown
At the beginning of the week (14 September 2026), I woke up to a collision of two AI discourses, one where President Donald Trump wants to win the AI race and another where Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, wants to slow things down. Both discourses are shaped by a cluster of movement metaphors which…
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From rogues to collectives: Myths and metaphors after the Hugging Face incident
Some weeks ago, I wrote a blog post just after reports about AI ‘going rogue’ had spread in the media. This referred to an incident at OpenAI that one can summarise like this: In July 2026, experimental AI models or ‘agents’ from OpenAI were given a complex cybersecurity assignment, but instead of completing it within…
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The apo-collapse
In April 2024 I asked myself a question and then didn’t answer it. Back then I was writing a blog post about “model collapse”, the unsettling metaphor for what happens when an AI trains on its own output, degrading generation after generation like a digital case of mad cow disease. I then began to wonder…
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Asilomar 1975 and 2025: Speech acts and the performance of responsibility
On 1 August 2026 Yonatan Chemla and Christopher A. Voigt published a report in Trends in Biotechnology, entitled “Responsible biotechnology: An analysis of the Asilomar 2025 entreaties”. This caught my attention, because, just over ten years ago, I wrote a blog post about the first Asilomar conference held in 1975 entitled ‘Ta(l)king responsibility’. And, of…
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AI watermarks: A placebo metaphor?
I have written about AI slop and AI fakes as part of my work here on the ‘metaphor observatory’ in the era of generative AI. So, when I saw posts on Bluesky about ‘watermarks’, I pricked up my ears. The buzz was all about Anthropic adding ‘watermarks’ to Claude so that one can see what…