Tag: ambiguity
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Polysemy, pragmatics and puppetry: What AI can learn from ethnomethodology
I recently wrote a blog post in which I summarised some research on the topic of multiple meanings and AI against the backdrop of an old paper of mine on ‘ambiguities we live by’, published in 2001 in the Journal of Pragmatics. Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics that studies how language is used in…
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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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Polysemy, safety and epistemic risks in AI discourse
In last week’s post I traced some connections between an old paper on ambiguity and polysemy that a colleague and I published in 2001, when generative AI and LLMs were not yet on the horizon, and a 2026 paper linking ambiguity and polysemy to modern AI discourse to hype and manipulation, power and ethics. In…
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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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Understanding computational hermeneutics: Making meaning between the past and the present
A large group of scholars led by Cody Kommers and Drew Hemment at the Alan Turing Institute recently published a paper on ‘computational hermeneutics’. They mention Hans-Georg Gadamer and Wilhelm Dilthey, two godfathers of hermeneutics, and talk about situated meaning, ambiguity and the plurality of meaning. How intriguing, I thought. The paper brought back memories…