Tag: metaphor
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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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From metaphors on market day to metaphors we live by
I was talking the other day with some people about AI metaphors. During that discussion the thorny question came up ‘what are metaphors anyway?’, followed by ‘is there anything in language that’s not metaphorical?’. This brought to mind a very old quote. In 1730 the grammarian and philosopher César Chesneau Du Marsais said: “I am…
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“Don’t bang your head on the guardrails”: Geoengineering metaphors, 2026
Sitting on a bus and browsing my timeline on Bluesky on Friday 9 January, I came across a comment by Gaia Vince saying: “Interesting to see the Guardian running a couple sensible opinion pieces on geoengineering recently”. I opened an article she pointed to and immediately saw a juicy metaphor: “In this sense, research acts…
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Making Science Public 2025: End-of-year round-up of blog posts
This year has been quite a year! First, I had to move the blog to a new independent home after the University of Nottingham shut down their blogging platform (I wrote two posts about this, one reflecting on the past and one on the future). Second, there was a lot to blog about, from wildfires…
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From symbolist poets to science communication: Exploring an invisible thread in my academic life
Years and years ago, I had an Academia profile in which I mentioned that when I began studying French literature in the mid-1970s I fell in love with Baudelaire and Rimbaud. I no longer have access to Academia, but somebody must have seen that sentence and recently sent me an email asking how I got…
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Observing shifts in metaphors for AI: What changed and why it matters
In my previous two posts I have made the case for an AI metaphor observatory and surveyed the recent academic landscape of studies dealing with metaphors for AI in the sense of GenAI and LLMs. In this post, the third and last in my ‘trilogy’, I’ll attempt to review recent trends and shifts in metaphor…
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Metaphors for AI: An overview of recent studies
In my previous post (part 1 of a trilogy) I called for an AI metaphor observatory to watch how people make sense (and sometimes nonsense) of generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI, through metaphors. I was pleased to see that many scholars are now collecting AI metaphors and studying them systematically and I provided a rough…
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Making the case for an AI metaphor observatory
Between 2023 and 2025 I have written various posts on GenAI, Large Language Models and metaphors: one where I went out hunting for metaphors; one where I had a chat with ChatGTP about metaphors for itself, metaphors that turned out to be rather magical; one focusing on food or culinary metaphors for AI; some dealing…
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The dark genome: A gothic tale with a happy ending
On 29 September Roger Highfield published an article for the Francis Crick Institute entitled “A message from the dark genome: The genetic ghosts that haunt and help us” (based on a chat with George Kassiotis and Samra Turajlic). This set my metaphor-whiskers twitching, as the article overflows with metaphors circling around the central one of…
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Erving Goffman: Memories, method and metaphors
If you do sociology or, indeed, any social science whatsoever, you’ll come across the work of Erving Goffman. I have done too but never engaged with it as much as I should have done. This was brought back to me when I talked with somebody who once shared a taxi-ride with Goffman and chatted with…
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