{"podcast":{"title":"Many Minds","slug":"many-minds-510509","podcast_index_feed_id":510509,"rss_url":"https://manyminds.libsyn.com/rss","website_url":"https://disi.org/manyminds/","image_url":"https://static.libsyn.com/p/assets/c/e/a/6/cea6fe4093035db1/DISI_Many_Minds_tile_art_screen_resolution_vfinal.png","author":"Kensy Cooperrider","episode_count":166,"summary":"Our world is brimming with beings—human, animal, and artificial. We explore how they think, sense, feel, and learn. Conversations and more, every two weeks.","last_synced_at":"2026-07-18T22:18:52.865257+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/many-minds-510509"},"episode":{"title":"Seven metaphors for AI","slug":"seven-metaphors-for-ai","published_at":"2026-02-26T00:26:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/many-minds-510509/seven-metaphors-for-ai","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/many-minds-510509","url":"https://manyminds.libsyn.com/seven-metaphors-for-ai","audio_url":"https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/manyminds/Seven-metaphors-for-AI-2.mp3?dest-id=1868261","summary":"If you wanted a petri dish for understanding metaphors—how they emerge and evolve and jostle with each other—it would be hard to do better than the world of AI. We talk about AI systems variously as coaches or co-pilots, little genies or alien intelligences. Some researchers claim that AIs \"grow,\" that they're entering their phase of \"adolescence.\" Critics deride AI products as slop and dismiss LLMs as a kind of autocomplete on steroids. What's behind these different characterizations? Which ones are accurate and which are unfair? And are our metaphors mostly colorful rhetoric or do they matter? Are they shaping how we understand, adopt, and ultimately regulate these new technologies? My guest today is Dr. Melanie Mitchell . Melanie is a computer scientist and Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of the book, AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans , and she writes a Substack by the same name. This episode is a bit of a companion to our recent episode with Steve Flusberg. In that episode, Steve and I attempted a kind of crash course on metaphor and the human mind. Here, Melanie and I sit down for more of an extended case study: how metaphors are guiding, galvanizing, and maybe deceiving us in the contested realm of AI discourse. We unpack seven of the most widely used metaphors in this space. We consider how these metaphors are shaping not only our everyday understandings of AI, but also law and policy. We also talk about the metaphor and analogy capabilities of AI itself. Can these systems reason abstractly in the way that humans can? Along the way, Melanie and I touch on: AI-generated poetry, anthropomorphism, the original sin of AI research, the myth of Narcissus, psychometric testing and its pitfalls, metaphors for AI that are a bit hard to spot, and the…","meta_description":"If you wanted a petri dish for understanding metaphors—how they emerge and evolve and jostle with each other—it would be hard to do better than the world…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":3346,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/many-minds-510509/episodes/seven-metaphors-for-ai/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/many-minds-510509/seven-metaphors-for-ai.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}