Tag: Artificial Intelligence
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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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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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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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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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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…