Assistant, Parrot, or Colonizing Loudspeaker? ChatGPT Metaphors for Developing Critical AI Literacies

TL;DR

This paper investigates how analyzing metaphors for AI, especially large language models like ChatGPT, can enhance critical AI literacy by fostering nuanced understanding, ethical awareness, and critical reflection through collaborative autoethnography.

Contribution

It introduces a heuristic model for analyzing AI metaphors based on anthropomorphism and multiliteracies, aiding educators and researchers in developing critical AI literacy.

Findings

Metaphor reflection promotes nuanced understanding of AI.

Autoethnographic approach facilitates critical dialogue.

Heuristic model helps analyze anthropomorphism and multiliteracies.

Abstract

This study explores how discussing metaphors for AI can help build awareness of the frames that shape our understanding of AI systems, particularly large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Given the pressing need to teach "critical AI literacy", discussion of metaphor provides an opportunity for inquiry and dialogue with space for nuance, playfulness, and critique. Using a collaborative autoethnographic methodology, we analyzed metaphors from a range of sources, and reflected on them individually according to seven questions, then met and discussed our interpretations. We then analyzed how our reflections contributed to the three kinds of literacies delineated in Selber's multiliteracies framework: functional, critical, and rhetorical. These allowed us to analyze questions of ethics, equity, and accessibility in relation to AI. We explored each metaphor along the dimension of whether or not it was promoting anthropomorphizing, and to what extent such metaphors imply that AI is sentient. Our findings highlight the role of metaphor reflection in fostering a nuanced understanding of AI, suggesting that our collaborative autoethnographic approach as well as the heuristic model of plotting AI metaphors on dimensions of anthropomorphism and multiliteracies, might be useful for educators and researchers in the pursuit of advancing critical AI literacy.