Short abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic research with language workers involved in producing LLMs and other AI technologies in Amman, Jordan to analyze metaphors—and the language ideologies animating them—as crucial material-semiotic practices for rendering Arabic an object of technological advancement.

Long abstract:

In May 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke at the Xpand Technology Conference in Amman, Jordan about artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs). In his opening remarks, tech mogul and moderator Fouad Jeryes emphasized the significance of the event happening in Jordan: “We remain a powerhouse here for tech…we are the creators of the overwhelming majority of [Arabic] content on the Internet.”

Discourses about Jordan’s inordinate production of digital content have circulated for over a decade but have taken on greater importance with the rise of LLMs and other AI-enabled technologies built on massive language corpora. Today, language workers in Jordan’s tech sector—a historically Anglocentric industry—not only accumulate socio-economic capital through their Arabic competencies; through everyday labor and discursive practices, they craft Arabic into a data-rich language of technological advancement.

This paper draws on a year of ethnographic research with language workers who help build and maintain LLMs in Amman’s tech sector—e.g., annotators, proofreaders, lexicographers—to understand the constitutive work of metaphor in constructing language technologies. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and participant observation, it analyzes the language ideologies that animate these metaphors and the mobilization of metaphor—successful or not—to translate technical concepts grounded in Anglocentric assumptions of how language ought to work. Bringing together STS and anthropological scholarship on metaphor (DeLoughrey 2013), language ideologies (Bauman and Briggs 2003), and language work (Orr 1996), this paper centers metaphor as a crucial material-semiotic practice for producing complex sociotechnical systems like LLMs, especially in linguistic contexts and political economies outside the Global North.