Tag: AI
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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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Making and unmaking AI metaphors and magic
Twenty years ago, Noel and Amanda Sharkey, seminal contributors to early AI debates, wrote an article on artificial intelligence and natural magic which deserves to be read again today. They focus on robots and could probably not have foreseen the advances made in the last three years in generative AI, but what they say holds…
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Moltbook: Snapshots of a metaphorical firework
(Now also available as podcast!!) In late January 2026, a social network appeared where only AIs could post and within days, the internet had responded with an explosion of parodies, panic, and metaphors that revealed as much about us as about the bots. In this post I have taken a few snapshots of this mimetic…
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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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AI veganism: A new dietary metaphor for a new type of discourse
A couple of weeks ago, I told my former colleague Sujatha Raman that I was collecting metaphors for AI, such as AI slop for example. She asked: “Have you heard about AI veganism?” I said no, I hadn’t, whereupon she sent me an article from The Guardian and that set me off down a rabbit…
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Timelines we live in: A linguistic investigation
At the beginning of the year, I was browsing my timeline on Bluesky* and came across sentences like this: “The absolute dumbest possible timeline. That’s what we live in.” “I know we all say ‘this is the stupidest timeline’ a lot but seriously this is the stupidest timeline”; “What a sh!tty-ass timeline to live in”;…