I worry that this would bias the kind of policy responses we want. I obviously don't have a study or anything, but it seems that the framing of the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism have encouraged too much violence. Which sounds like a better way to fight the War on Terror, negotiating in complicated local tribal politics or going in and killing some terrorists? Which is actually a better policy?
I don't know exactly how this would play out in a case where no violence makes sense (like the Cardiovascular Vampire). Maybe increased research as part of a "war effort" would work. But it seems to me that this framing would encourage simple and immediate solutions, which would be a serious drawback.
I posted in Practical Ethics, arguing that if we mentally anthropomorphised certain risks, then we'd be more likely to give them the attention they deserved. Slaying the Cardiovascular Vampire, defeating the Parasitic Diseases Death Cult, and banishing the Demon of Infection... these stories give a mental picture of the actual good we're doing when combating these issues, and the bad we're doing by ignoring them. Imagine a politician proclaiming:
An amusing thing to contemplate - except, of course, if there were a real Cardiovascular Vampire, politicians and pundits would be falling over themselves with those kinds of announcements.
The field of AI is already over-saturated with anthropomorphisation, so we definitely shouldn't be imagining Clippy as some human-like entity that we can heroically combat, with all the rules of narrative applying. Still it can't hurt to dream up a hideous Bias Demon in its mishaped (though superficially plausible) lair, cackling in glee as someone foolishly attempts to implement an AI design without the proper safety precautions, smiling serenely as prominent futurist dismiss the risk... and dissolving, hit by the holy water of increased rationality and proper AI research. Those images might help us make the right emotional connection to what we're achieving here.