Tag: metaphor
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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 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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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…
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‘Habsburg AI’: Portrait of a metaphor and its family
A reader of my blog (yes, there is one!) recently asked me whether I had heard of “Habsburg AI”. To my shame I had not. So, I looked it up and what I found made me think, both about AI and about metaphors for AI. I have been blogging about metaphors for AI for a…