Between metaphor and meaning: AI and being human (original) (raw)
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.
Seeing the voice of the customer: Metaphor-based advertising research
Journal of Advertising Research, 1995
Although improvements in traditional quantitative and qualitative research techniques have enhanced our ability to collect timely, valid, and reliable data, and to analyze these data with greater insights, advertising practitioners continue to search for and experiment with alternative methodologies. We offer seven basic premises for improving advertising research and copy development and then introduce the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique, ZMET. ZMET is designed to surface the mental models that drive consumer thinking and behavior and characterize these models in actionable ways using consumers, metaphors. We suggest that ZMET is a promising means for improving advertising research.
Turkish Language Prospective Teachers’ Perceptions of Metaphors Regarding Artificial Intelligence
Shanlax International Journal of Education, 2024
The concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) initially emerged as a term in the field of computer science. In the subsequent years, this concept transcended its origins and became relevant across various domains of human life. Nowadays, it’s possible to encounter AI in nearly every aspect of human life. In this context, it’s considered noteworthy to examine individuals’ metaphorical perceptions of AI. Accordingly, the purpose of the research is determined as the investigation of Turkish prospective teachers’ metaphorical perceptions of AI. Phenomenology, a qualitative research method, is employed in the study. The study group consists of 115 voluntary Turkish prospective teachers, 94 of whom are female and 21 are male, studying at the Faculty of Education at Artvin Çoruh University. Among the prospective teachers, 36 are first-year students, 37 are second-year students, 26 are third-year students, and 16 are fourth-year students. Data for the research are collected through semi-structured interview forms prepared by the researchers. Content analysis method is used for data analysis, and the data are presented by tabulating them along with frequency values. The analysis reveals that 115 Turkish language prospective teachers produced a total of 110 metaphors. Among these metaphors, 21 belong to male prospective teachers, while 89 belong to female prospective teachers. Metaphors such as human (f19), robot (f10), future (f4), ocean (f3), storm (f2), spring (f2), assistant (f4) are found to be generated by both female and male prospective teachers. In addition to positive metaphors, Turkish language prospective teachers also generated negative metaphors like threat (f2), massacre (f1), monster (f1), etc., concerning AI. Consequently, although Turkish language prospective teachers developed some negative metaphors, it’s observed that their perceptions of AI are predominantly positive.
The strategic use of the visual mode in advertising metaphors
In: Emilia Djonov and Sumin Zhao (eds), Critical Multimodal Studies of Popular Culture , 2013
Metaphors present one kind of thing (a “target”) in terms of another (a “source”), and are therefore ideal instruments for advertisers to make claims about products (the metaphors’ targets) efficiently and implicitly. Since the intended interpretation of metaphors is often not spelled out, advertisers often get away with suggesting meanings without taking responsibility for them by making skillful use of the visuals as part of metaphors. This chapter explains how visual and multimodal metaphors in advertising work, and discusses some cases to show how metaphor analysis can be a critical tool in the evaluation of advertising.
2002
In this paper, we provide the groundwork for an analysis of metaphor from the point of view of cognitive linguistics. This study attempts to show an interpretation of metaphor which is different from a mere comparison or substitution function and is by no means a deviant or marginal process. We refer to metaphor not only as a matter of language but also as one of thought, that is, in the way we conceptualize one mental domain in terms of another. The specific focus is to analyse the metaphors used in advertising to transfer valúes to a banking institution. As a result, we aim to demónstrate that cognitive semantics and axiology are closely related.
2016
This paper offers the first large-scale study of a multimodal corpus of 210 advertisements. First, the reader is presented with a description of the corpus in terms of the distribution of conceptual operations (for the purposes of this work, metaphor and metonymy) and use of modal cues. Subsequently, the weight of mode and marketing strategy to trigger more or less amounts of conceptual complexity is analysed. This corpus-based survey is complemented with the qualitative analysis of three novel metaphor-metonymy interactions that stem from the data and that have not yet been surveyed in multimodal use. The results show that metaphtonymy (a metaphor-metonymy compound) is the most frequent conceptual operation in the corpus; that there is a significant effect of the use of modes in the activation of different amounts of conceptual complexity; and that the type of advertised product and the marketing strategy has no significant effect on the number and complexity of conceptual mappings in the advertisement.
Visual Metaphors in Language of Advertising
Everybody more or less is familiar with the term metaphor. According to Berger (2012) metaphor is a form of analogy. He defined it as a mode of communication in which meaning is generated by making comparisons.Visual metaphors are basically highly structured images that stimulate the viewers to understand one concept in terms of another concept. These images are commonly used in several fields in communication, in advertising, in social campaign, in political cartoons and so on.This was first extensively explored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their work Metaphors We Live By.
The role of figurative complexity in the comprehension and appreciation of advertisements
To date, research in advertising has focussed almost exclusively on metaphor, with linguists and marketing scholars paying very little attention to alternative types of figurative expression. Beyond the finding that metaphor leads to an increased appreciation of advertisements, there has been surprisingly little research into how consumer response is affected by metonymy, or by metaphor–metonymy interactions. In this article, we present findings from a study that investigated the depth to which participants (n = 90) from a range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds (the UK, Spain, and China) were found to process 30 real-world adverts featuring creative metaphor and metonymy in multimodal format. We focus on the cross-cultural variation in terms of time taken to process, appreciation and perceived effectiveness of adverts, and on individual differences explained by different levels of need for cognition. We found significant variation in the understanding of advertisements containing metaphor, metonymy, and combinations of the two, between subjects and across nationalities in terms of (i) processing time, (ii) overall appeal, and (iii) the way in which participants interpreted the advertisements.
The Cross-Cultural Understanding of Metaphors in the Information Technology Sphere
Cognitive Studies | Études cognitives
The Cross-Cultural Understanding of Metaphors in the Information Technology SphereThis paper analyses recent changes in cross-cultural communication concerning metaphor use and its functioning on the Internet, specifically in the information technology sphere.The paper outlines the academic literature and proposes a study that aims to evaluate users’ perception of IT metaphors. The study analyses reports and articles for IT users. The articles were profiled according to country and language, with a detailed analysis of English and Ukrainian examples. The paper reviews the relation between IT metaphors and their cognition, introducing a new conceptualization “A Computer as a Human Being”. The research seeks to provide evidence for the claim that understanding metaphors facilitates cross-cultural communication, whether universal or culturally-bounded.The results show the growing scale of the creation of new metaphors due to cross-cultural communication, especially in the IT sphere, an...
Blending metaphors and arguments in advertising
The present chapter aims at outlining a framework of analysis which allows us to identify the central factors of advertising messages, in particular the arguments addressers want to provide to addressees in order to convince them about the worth of the advertised product. Through the analysis of successful ads, we will try to understand how visual manifestations of metaphor and hyperbole are effective in the argumentation taking place in advertising discourse. A three-step analysis will help us going deeper in how ads are structured and work.
Silpakorn University Journal of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts, 2015
Metaphor is an important tool for developing business theories and communicating ideas in a business context. Linguistic research investigates the metaphors used in business English from various perspectives. This paper problematizes previous studies in terms of their applications of metaphor theories, the data and the methodological issues associated with metaphor identification and retrieval. These issues have profound influence on the findings and our knowledge of metaphors. It is argued that some of the studies employ a superficial view of metaphor and a more critical analysis and dynamic theories of metaphor is required. Furthermore, metaphor in multimodal communication needs more investigation. In addition, data are mainly written texts and thus spoken data require more attention in metaphor in business English research. What is more, clear criteria essential for identifying metaphorical expressions and methods for retrieving metaphors from large data sets are discussed. Only ...