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ChatGPT and its magical metaphors

Last week, a new issue of Technoscienza, an Italian journal of Science and Technology Studies, landed in my inbox. It had a very intriguing cover, co-created between Sergio Minniti and ChatGPT — a portrait drawn by ChatGPT using ASCII. But that was the least of it. After Sergio had prompted ChatGPT to create this stunning …

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Talking with Claude about machine metaphors in biology

In my last blog post I said that I had writer’s block – and I still have. I said so to my son and whined a bit. He said: “Remember Christmas 2022? You were complaining about the same thing and I said, go and play with ChatGPT, which had just come out, and that got …

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Metaphor identification: From manual to automatic

I have written about metaphors for AIs and LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT, but I don’t know much about what one might call the mechanics of metaphor recognition, identification and interpretation inside LLMs. So, I wanted to find out and went down a rabbit hole – I never quite reached the bottom…. Metaphor and …

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How to do things with prompts: Magic words, speech acts and AI

Looking at what’s going on in AI sometimes makes me feel like the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, When he first visited the Trobriand Islands of then British New Guinea about a century ago, he became fascinated by the magic words that the islanders used and the actions they were believed to perform. Visiting the land of …

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AI safety: It’s everywhere but what is it?

AI Safety is the new black. It is everywhere. As Alex Hern wrote from the Seoul AI safety summit on Tuesday “The hot AI summer is upon us” and with it the hot AI safety summer…. When you look at this timeline for “AI safety” on the news database Nexis, you can see that the …

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From contamination to collapse: On the trail of a new AI metaphor

I wrote my first ever post about AI and ChatGPT on 6 January 2023. Amongst other things, I talked about the danger of ‘knowledge pollution’. I wanted to highlight the dangers of a gradual corruption of our knowledge base. Knowledge pollution ChatGPT and many other bots or AIs like it are based on large language …

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Hunting for AI metaphors

Thousands of articles and blog posts have been written about generative AI, especially ChatGPT. Some or these, especially blog posts, are about metaphors. As a metaphor hunter (see image!) I feel a bit ashamed that I haven’t done much on metaphor and AI. A little bit yes; for example, on what metaphors ChatGPT uses about …

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Making epigenetics familiar: The visual construction of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in the news

Some time ago I wrote a blog post with Aleksandra Stelmach and Alan Miguel Valdez  about visuals used to make epigenetics public through the popular lens of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. I then promised some image analysis. Here is a summary of what we found (I thank ChatGPT for helping me summarise our findings. If you want references, …

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Responsible AI to the max: Meet Goody-2

This is not a real blog post. I just needed to mark the advent of a thought-provoking and funny, yes funny, AI, namely Goody-2 (and my brain always adds ‘shoes’….). Finding Goody-2 A couple of days ago, I saw this tweet by Melanie Mitchell, a complexity scientist and expert on AI, which made me curious. …

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Humanising artificial intelligence and dehumanising actual intelligence

Millions of people will now have interacted with a new form of accessible artificial intelligence, in the form of ChatGPT, DALL-E or Midjourney. Many will have had (at first) quite strange feelings of empathy with the bot, saying please and thank you and trying not to overburden it. We might also admire its apparent humility …

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