Gupta, Atef, Mills, and Bali’s 2024 article  ‘Assistant, Parrot, or Colonizing Loudspeaker? ChatGPT Metaphors for Developing Critical AI Literacies’, inspired us to further investigate prevalent metaphors describing GenAI and observe the diverse and developing attitudes towards the technology. In a workshop for the IWCA Collab@CCCC25, we first introduced the article, in which the authors organize collected metaphors in a grid: along a y-axis of Selber’s multiliteracy framework as functional, critical, or rhetorical, and along an x-axis that characterizes the metaphors’ level of anthropomorphization.

How do different constituents currently describe GenAI? What metaphors do AI companies use? How do our institutions’ policies describe the technology? How might ChatGPT describe itself? And how do we as individuals describe it based on our experiences? The metaphors we collect will help us examine how positionality influences discourse, what implicit values shape dominant conversations, and how metaphor analysis can strengthen vital aspects of AI literacy.