Category: Metaphors
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Pacing the frontier: An analysis of two hybrid metaphors in AI discourse
I have recently written a blog post about various movement metaphors used in AI discourse, especially those of ‘race’ and ‘journey’. A related metaphor, that of ‘pace’ or ‘pacing’, focusing on the rate and regulation of movement, has been made prominent in a September essay by Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, entitled “We must pace…
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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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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…
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Remember Wegener?!
This blog post was first published on the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences blog on 26 July 2026 and is republished here with permission. *** My old book Change in Language: Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener has just come out as an ebook. It was first published in 1990 and has now been reissued in Routledge’s History…
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AI, metaphors and control
In the early 2000s, during the dramatic but now almost forgotten outbreak of foot and mouth disease in cattle, I wrote about war metaphors and the issue of projecting control over an ‘out of control’ virus through metaphor. Recently, in the age of AI, we have seen a mirror image of the control framing emerging,…
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The cage and the core: Metaphor in Claude’s constitution
This is a guest post by Yury Sorochkin, an Independent Scholar ••• In January 2026 Anthropic published an 84-page document called Claude’s Constitution. It was written, its authors say, primarily for Claude — the company’s AI assistant — and it sets out in considerable philosophical detail the values, behavioural constraints, identity and possible moral status…
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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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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…