Tag: technology
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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”;…
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From sloppers to slopocalypse: The lexical productivity of AI slop
At the end of last year, I wrote a blog post in which I dissected the word ‘enshittification’, a staple of AI slang. At the beginning of this year, I want to do the same for enshittification’s conceptual friend ‘slop’, an indicator of what some call the slopification of AI. As the MIT Technology Review…
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Parasocial Relationships: Problematic Practice or Public Promise?
This year’s Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year is “parasocial”—spurred on by growing concerns over our love affair with AI chatbots. ••• This is a quick guest post/repost by Andrew Maynard. Andrew first published it on his Substack “The Future of Being Human” on 19 November, 2025. I read it while waiting for the dentist…
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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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Enshittification: A word for our times
On 9 October Jack Stilgoe posted a question on Bluesky: “Has Cory Doctorow done a piece on the enshittification of enshittification yet?” Ken Tindall replied: “The word enshittification has turned to shit but not through a process of enshittification.” This made me think. Is it true? Is there evidence for this? So, I started to…
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Participation at the core: AI, ELSI and community engagement
Alondra Nelson, a sociologist, STS scholar and expert on AI policy and ethics, recently published a letter in Science proposing that artificial intelligence (AI) should adopt the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) framework from genomics, an approach designed to put social concerns at the heart of technology governance. Nelson argues that meaningful community engagement…
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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…
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AI winter and AI bubble: Historical and metaphorical reflections
I have followed the emergence of recent developments in AI from the end of 2022 onwards, marked by the launch of OpenAI‘s AI chatbot ChatGPT. It’s now the middle of 2025 and a LOT has happened in this space. From being a niche and nerdy topic, AI has become a topic discussed across society. Recently, I…
Making Science Public 