Category: Metaphors
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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…
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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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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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Mud, monsters and solidarity: Social representations of the 2024 Valencia floods
Last week I wrote a post about the 2025 California wildfires. This week’s post is about the 2024 Valencia floods. These are just two examples of increasingly frequent extreme weather events that affect people around the word. They also affect the language we speak, especially the metaphors we use to make sense of such events.…
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Fire, wind, and lies: How we talk about wildfire shapes how we respond
Rusi Jaspal and I recently published an article on the metaphorical framing of the January 2025 Southern California wildfires. Here is a short blog post about it to whet your appetite for the real thing which appeared online first in Metaphor and the Social World under the title “Fire, wind and lies: Mapping the metaphorical…
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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…