Name: Clanker.
Age: 20 years old.
Appearance: Everywhere, but mostly on social media.
It sounds a bit insulting. It is, in fact, a slur.
What kind of slur? A slur against robots.
Because they’re metal? While it’s sometimes used to denigrate actual robots – including delivery bots and self-driving cars – it’s increasingly used to insult AI chatbots and platforms such as ChatGPT.
I’m new to this – why would I want to insult AI? For making up information, peddling outright falsehoods, generating “slop” (lame or obviously fake content) or simply not being human enough.
Does the AI care that you’re insulting it? That’s a complex and hotly debated philosophical question, to which the answer is “no”.
Then why bother? People are taking out their frustrations on a technology that is becoming pervasive, intrusive and may well threaten their future employment.
Clankers, coming over here, taking our jobs! That’s the idea.
Where did this slur originate? First used to refer pejoratively to battle androids in a Star Wars game in 2005, clanker was later popularised in the Clone Wars TV series. From there, it progressed to Reddit, memes and TikTok.
And is it really the best we can do, insult-wise? Popular culture has spawned other anti-robot slurs – there’s “toaster” from Battlestar Galactica, and “skin-job” from Blade Runner – but “clanker” seems to have won out for now.
It seems like a stupid waste of time, but I guess it’s harmless enough. You say that, but many suggest using “clanker” could help to normalise actual bigotry.
Oh, come on now. Popular memes and spoof videos tend to treat “clanker” as being directly analogous to a racial slur – suggesting a future where we all harass robots as if they were an oppressed minority.
So what? They’re just clankers. “Naturally, when we trend in that direction, it does play into those tropes of how people have treated marginalised communities before,” says linguist Adam Aleksic.
I’m not anti-robot; I just wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one. Can you hear how that sounds?
I have a feeling we’re going to be very embarrassed about all this in 10 years. Probably. Some people argue that, by insulting AI, we’re crediting it with a level of humanity it doesn’t warrant.
That would certainly be my assessment. However, the “Roko’s basilisk” thought experiment posits that a future artificial superintelligence might punish all those who failed to help it flourish in the first place.
I guess calling it a clanker would count. We may end up apologising to our robot overlords for past hate crimes.
Or perhaps they’ll see the funny side of all this? Assuming the clankers develop a sense of humour some day.
Do say: “The impulse to coin this slur says more about our anxieties than it does about the technology itself.”
Don’t say: “Some of my best friends are clankers.”
