Between metaphor and meaning: AI and being human (original) (raw)
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Metaphorical conceptualization of AI in digital discourse
Methaodos, 2024
This study investigates the conceptual metaphors employed to characterize Artificial Intelligence (AI) within online public discourse. By using a cognitive semantic approach, this investigation aims to uncover how metaphors shape social perceptionsof AI, revealing the cognitive mechanisms involved in making sense of this rapidly evolving technology. An adapted version of the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) has been combined with semantic frames to analyze the metaphorical mappings between the source and target frames, offering a more precise examination of the metaphors' conceptual structure. The analysis reveals a spectrum of metaphors portraying AI both as a beneficial partner and a potential threat, reflecting diverse attitudes and concerns about its integration into society. By focusing on the frame level, this study provides a fine-grained understanding of how different aspects of AI are construed through familiar conceptual frames. The findings contribute to the field of Cognitive Semantics andoffer valuable insights for AI developers, educators, and communicators, emphasizing the importance of metaphors in framing society’s understanding of emerging technologies. Keywords: artificial intelligence, cognitive semantics, conceptual metaphor, domains, frames.
Metaphor and Artificial Intelligence
Why is Artificial Intelligence concerned with metaphor, and what special contributions can AI offer to metaphor research? This chapter will indicate why AI needs to study metaphor and will outline what AI has been contributing to the illumination of metaphor, whether it is processed by artefacts or by the human mind.
The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence, 2019
own ref lexes, I am witnessing a life-changing event: the emergence of an all but artificial intelligence. Slowly, the motor activities become increasingly controlled, the musculature is gradually building up, and the gaze seems to follow points of interest somewhat consciously, with a dose of curiosity and awe. A young human learns. Seeing the development of a new life, makes me radically rethink the concepts of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and even more so the significance of language, which has the power to shape political reality. Can machines think, asked Alan M. Turing almost seventy years ago (1950). His provocative metaphor until today conditions the way computer scientists tend to perceive the capacity of algorithms to process data and yield "intelligent" (or rather intelligible) results. The image of an intelligent machine has grown strong in the public eye. Today, we talk of "smart" infrastructures, smart TVs, smart homes, even smart cities; all exemplifying the so-called "smartness mandate" (Halpern, Mitchel, Gheoghegan 2017). Can machines learn? It is no longer a question, but an assumption and a method used in almost every discipline reliant on big data, from physics, over marketing and finance to agriculture. Thinking and learning, inherently human qualities, when used with reference to machines seem to make little sense. They are often dismissed as innocent metaphors. But words have power. Not only do they describe the surrounding reality, but shape the way we think and act (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). In that sense, machine "intelligence" is much more than a rhetorical device. It inf luences our perception of it as an (in)human quality. The concept of intelligence originates from a very specific and narrow understanding of what it means to behave as an intelligent entity. Christoph von der Malsburg, considered a pioneer of artificial intelligence and originally trained as a particle physicist, in his neurobiological research on intelligence focused mainly on visual cognition and memory (Malsburg 1990). It is not difficult to draw a parallel to the contemporary understanding of machine learning algorithms, often praised for their beyond human capacity to recognize patterns out of a pool of gargantuan data sets. To an anthropologist who considers anthropocentric criteria of difference to be fundamentally suspect, this oversimplified human versus machine metaphorical comparison seems somewhat disappointing in its naiveté, if not spine-chilling. Von der Malsburg triumphantly argued that human brains do not exceed the memory capacity of more than one gigabyte. But humans are not fed with raw data sets. And machines, unlike humans, do not necessarily have a palimpsestuous biological memory of experiences but rather are an extended memory, to play along with von der Malsburg's metaphor of a capacious container for data storage. Above all, human intelligence and memory do not stand in an one-dimensional relationship to each other. Intelligence is an embodied process, highly depen
What makes a good metaphor? A cross-cultural study of computer-generated metaphor appreciation
Computers are now able to automatically generate metaphors, but some automatically-generated metaphors are more well-received than others. In this paper, we showed participants a series of 'A is B' type metaphors that were either generated by humans or taken from the Twitter account '@Metaphorismybusiness', which is linked to a fully automated metaphor generator. We used these metaphors to assess linguistic factors that drive metaphor appreciation and understanding, including the role of novelty, word frequency, concreteness and emotional valence of the topic and vehicle terms. We additionally assessed how these metaphors were understood in three languages, including English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, and whether participants thought they had been generated by a human or a computer. We found that meaningfulness, appreciation, speed in finding meaning and humanness ratings were reliably correlated with each other in all three languages, which we interpret to indicate a more general property of 'metaphor quality'. We furthermore found that in all three languages, conventional metaphors and those that contained an 'optimal' (intermediate) degree of novelty were more likely to be perceived to be of higher quality than those that were extremely creative. Further analysis of the English data alone revealed that those metaphors that contained negatively valenced vehicle words and infrequent vehicle terms (in comparison with the topic terms) were more likely to be considered high-quality metaphors. We discuss the implications of these findings for the (improvement of) automatic generation of metaphor by computers, for the persuasive function of metaphor, and for theories of metaphor understanding more generally.
The Role of Metaphor in Advertisement Texts: A Psycholinguistic-Structural Study
Journal of University of Human Development, 2019
This paper investigates the role and usage of metaphor in advertising texts from a psycho-linguistic, structural perspective. It adopts Al- Najjar (1984) structural classification of metaphor to go hand in hand with Frazier's (1987) perceptual theory of garden path of comprehension on the side of the advertisees. The analysis traces the impact of employing metaphorical texts in texting adverts. It discusses how, linguistically, unrelated words are connected together in terms of cognitive process (garden path). Indirect targeting of meaning by manipulating linguistic tools like structural options generates one of the most attractive factors for a text which is vagueness. Hovering around the exact wording of some meaning provides the advertiser enough space to insert multi-meanings, concepts, and ideas. As such, different unique impact can be made on the advertisees. The paper analyses some selected English advertising texts depending on an eclectic model made out of these two mod...
Metaphors in Advertising Discourse
Studies in Literature and Language, 2010
Metaphors are the mappings of the abstract world into the concrete world through human senses or experiences. In Vietnamese advertisements, brands are metaphorized and brand metaphors can be categorized into ontological and structural metaphors. BRAND IS MOTION is a structural metaphor, and BRAND IS A CONTAINER, BRAND IS A VALUABLE RESOURCE, BRAND IS A COMPANION, and BRAND IS A GLADIATOR are instances of ontological metaphors.