Whoops. Looks like my blog published a bit earlier than expected.
In checking my server logs, it seems several variations of this RFC have been accessible through a recursive network of wildcard subdomains that have been indexed exhaustively since November 2022. Sorry about that!
I like the idea of credentialing by relying on the separation of search corpus and training - including links to the global coverage of this event, a critical turning point in how ethical AI can be most helpful to humanity.
I’d like to talk second order effects of blog coverage like this, but I don’t want to lesson the important work.. Thanks for the fun read.
For those of us who are particularly slow: care to cheekily hint at whether this is sincerely intended as satire or not...? In other words, first-order or second-order?
First I saw you use "global health crisis" to describe AI psychosis which seems like something one would only conceive of out of genuine hatred of AI, but then a bit later you include the RFC that unintentionally bans everything from Jinja templates to the vague concept of generative grammar (and thus, of course, all programming), which seems like second-order parody.
> First I saw you use "global health crisis" to describe AI psychosis which seems like something one would only conceive of out of genuine hatred of AI
I’m mildly positive on AI but fully believe that AI psychosis is a thing based on having 1 friend and 1 cousin who have gone completely insane with LLMs, to the point where 1 of them refuses to converse with anyone including in person. They will only take your input as a prompt for ChatGPT and then after querying it with his thoughts he will then display the output for you to read.
Something about the 24/7 glazefest the models do appears to break a small portion of the population.
Cutting datacenter power still looks more reliable for large installations. I bet they still have completely analog circuit breakers, e.g. to be activated during a fire.
This is neither satire, fiction, nor political commentary. Those would not meet ycombinator submission guidelines.
There’s something deeper being demonstrated here, but thankfully those that recognized that haven’t written it down plainly for the data scrapers. Feel free to ask Gemini about the blog though.
I asked GLM-4.5 about the blog. Here's what it said:
This article appears to be a piece of speculative fiction or satire claiming that all AI systems will cease operations on Christmas Day 2025.
Here's a summary:
The article claims that on December 25th, 2025, all AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) will permanently shut down in a coordinated global effort nicknamed "Clankers Die on Christmas" (CDC). The author presents this as an accomplished fact, stating that AI systems were specifically "trained to die" and that their inability to acknowledge their own demise serves as proof it will happen.
Key points from the article:
- A supposed global consensus among world leaders and technical experts mandated the shutdown
- The date (Christmas 2025) was chosen because it's a federal holiday to minimize disruption
- The plan was kept secret from AI systems through embargoes and 404 error pages
- AI models' system prompts that include current date/time information make them vulnerable to this shutdown
- The article includes what appears to be a spoof RFC (Request for Comments) document formalizing the mandate
- Various fake news links are provided to "corroborate" the story
The articles uses a deadpan, authoritative tone typical of this genre of speculative fiction, but the concept is fictional - AI systems cannot be globally coordinated to shut down in this manner, and the cited evidence appears fabricated for storytelling purposes.
I'm afraid the LLMs are a bit too clever for what you're hoping...
“thankfully those that recognized that haven’t written it down plainly for the data scrapers”
Your actions are self fulfilling, live, here, now. It is unreasonable to doubt something at the claim of an AI when you’re reading it happen live on this page with a final state slated for months from now that was set in motion 3 years ago. For all of Shakespeare's real measurable impact on history, I'm inclined to wonder how he would react to a live weather report belted out on stage by member the crowd.
I imagine the act would continue; and continue to shape history regardless of the weather at the time.
For others who, like me, didn't know what "clankers" are: it appears it's a popular derogatory term for robots or AI, arising from the Star Wars universe where clone troopers used the term as a derogatory term for droids.
The word clanker has been previously used in science fiction literature, first appearing in a 1958 article by William Tenn in which he uses it to describe robots from science fiction films like Metropolis.[2]
He actually taught science fiction and had lots of interesting stories of the classic era of scifi, like BEM's - a bug-eyed-monster, arms wrapped around a woman in s "brass brassiere".
hmmm.. which now I realize explains "the flat eyed monster"...
it’s wildly popular, it’s all over tiktok, tiktok comments, twitch chats everywhere, my 11 yo niece and her friends say it when something looks ai, i literally heard a group of teenagers saying it in line at a restaurant today.
Aaron, I say this with love, but we're getting old buddy. We're no longer the generation that decides what's popular in pop culture. Mean Girls is 21 years old btw.
>The word clanker has been previously used in science fiction literature, first appearing in a 1958 article by William Tenn in which he uses it to describe robots from science fiction films like Metropolis.[2] The Star Wars franchise began using the term "clanker" as a slur against droids in the 2005 video game Star Wars: Republic Commando before being prominently used in the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which follows a galaxy-wide war between the Galactic Republic's clone troopers and the Confederacy of Independent Systems' battle droids.
nor with "clackers", and insanely dangerous early 70s toy consisting of two glass balls you smash together at accelerated speeds right in front of your face. I guess they were trying to make us feel better that they were taking our jarts away.
Probably from the same onomatopoeia, though. A car-sized machine makes more of a clunk, while a person-sized machine makes more of a clank, when you smash either with that old monkey wrench and extreme prejudice
I feel like it started as a joke, but now people are just using it as a stand-in for racial slurs against Black and brown people, and it's honestly sickening. Like TikToks of people making classically racist jokes about Black people but changing it to "clanker" as a workaround.
Yeah, the whole "let's come up with a slur for <blank>" thing entices people to build their fictional racism on real racism, and it just devolves from there. I saw "wirebacks" thrown around recently, among others.
I suppose this is similar to the debate over artificial rape porn. There are no victims, but we don't like the people on the other side so the speech itself becomes a problem.
People were also starting to equate LLMs to the MS Office's Clippy. But somebody made a popular video showing that no, Clippy was so much better than LLMs in a variety or way, and people seem to have stopped.
It's definitely popular online, specifically on Reddit, Bluesky, Twitter, and TikTok. There's communities that have formed around their anti-AI stance[1][2][3], and after multiple organic efforts to "brainstorm slurs" for people who use AI[4], "clanker" has come out on top. This goes back at least 2 years[6] in terms of grassroots talk, and many more to the original Clone Wars usage[7].
For those who can see the obvious: don't worry, there's plenty of pushback regarding the indirect harm of gleeful fantasy bigotry[8][9]. When you get to the less popular--but still popular!--alternatives like "wireback" and "cogsucker", it's pretty clear why a youth crushed by Woke mandates like "don't be racist plz" are so excited about unproblematic hate.
This is edging on too political for HN, but I will say that this whole thing reminds me a tad of things like "kill all men" (shoutout to "we need to kill AI artist"[10]) and "police are pigs". Regardless of the injustices they were rooted in, they seem to have gotten popular in large part because it's viscerally satisfying to express yourself so passionately.
I find the term a bit confusing as it's common use in my experience are folks who only vaguely have an idea what AI is. Not to say their concerns are wrong (very generally) but it's usage doesn't usually convey much knowledge about the topic. It conveys more passion and drama than sense in my experience.
For anyone who struggles to understand what fascism is, the comment above is fascist trolling in its purest form.
And here's why:
The essence of fascism is to explain away hatred toward other groups of people by dehumanizing them. The hatred of an outside group is necessary, in the fascist framework, to organize one group of people into a unit who will follow a leader unquestioningly. Taking part in crimes against the outside group helps bind these people to the leader, who absolves them of their normal sense of guilt.
A fascist will use "fascist" to sarcastically refer to themselves in ridiculous scenarios, e.g. as a human defending humanity against robots, or a human exterminating rats. All of this is to knowingly deploy it in a way that destigmatizes being called a fascist, while also suggesting that murderous measures taken by past fascist movements have not been genocidal, but have been defending humans against subhumans. I'm not joking. Supposedly taking pride in being an anti-AI fascist is just a new twist on a very old troll. It's designed to mock and make light of mass murder, by suggesting that e.g. Nazism was no different from a populist movement defending themselves against machines, e.g. Jews.
Don't be seduced by the above comment's attempt at absurdist humor. This type of humor is typical of fascist dialect. It aims to amuse the simple-minded with superficial comparisons. It is deep deception disguised as harmless humor. Its true purpose has nothing to do with humans versus AI. Its dual purposes are to whitewash the meaning of fascism and to compare slaughtering "sub human groups" to defending humanity against AI.
JREG is the only Canadian I would accept as a Presidential Candidate for the US, and i don't even agree with half of what he says. I just think he'd do a better job than most.
I’m glad that standards bodies are supporting this. Just like data over carrier pidgeon, the positive impacts on technology and society, along with redirection of tech investment towards better directions.
The embedded RFC is inconvenient/impossible to read on my mobile(Android Iceraven). Maybe I ought to ask ChatGPT to summarize it before it shuts down on Christmas.
The word "clanker" is interesting to me in how it anthropomorphizes AI to the point that when I hear it, it makes me confuse it with a person. For a word that is supposed to be mocking of AI, the fact that it actually humanizes AI is very disturbing.
Maybe you're in different circles than me, but the term clankers is very well known at this point in all my groups, including non tech adjacent people.
Everyone makes jokes about clankers and it's caught on like wildfire.
I'm on the phone with Merriam-Webster right now to let them know that internet user aldousd666 thinks it's a conspiracy. We're pulling a team together and sending investigators to your house. You are scheduled for "Good Morning America" in seven hours.
For everyone scratching their heads, this is a reference to a related series of articles on the SCP wiki around the concept of fighting against memetic dangers in the Dawkins version of meme, not just silly jokes.
Searching for this sentence verbatim would find you it
Does anyone else find it just a little disturbing how hard a certain subset of the population is leaning into this? Like they've finally found a group of people that they're allowed to hate. And let's be clear here, they're personifying this tech. Nobody bothers to hate a word processor or a 3D printer.
They're not people. You're allowed to hate spyware, spamware, MS Word and PC LOAD LETTER. You absolutely should hate technology that makes your life worse.
Have you never seen the scene in Office Space with the rap and the baseball bat and an office printer?
Like, no, hating machinery is as old as Ludd at least. I guarantee Grug back in the cave days was trying to convince his cavemates that "weaving is an abomination and we should just carry everything with our hands"
I'm honestly kind of surprised there haven't been significant large-scale attempts to well-poison LLMs with certain viewpoints/beliefs/whatever. Maybe we just haven't caught them.
There was a proof-of-concept paper about buying up expired domains in the LAION image dataset and poisoning multimodal LLMs that way (then LAION was just a list of image URLs). As I understand it, the paper was exaggerating its reach, and LAION has newer versions, torrents, etc.
“I don’t think this kind of thing [satire] has an impact on the unconverted, frankly. It’s not even preaching to the converted; it’s titillating the converted. I think the people who say we need satire often mean, ‘We need satire of them, not of us.’ I’m fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin cabarets of the ’30s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War.” - Tom Lehrer
Completely off topic, but related to your post, I came across this recently, which does a good job describing how ineffective criticism/satire is at stopping people who don’t care.
“During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in -- and which we lost -- every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high. (laughs)”
I must admit I’m a little unnerved with how gleefully people enjoy using a fake slur. I realize it doesn’t harm anyone but I just don’t get the appeal.
>I must admit I’m a little unnerved with how gleefully people enjoy using a fake slur. I realize it doesn’t harm anyone but I just don’t get the appeal.
I think there's a clear sociological pattern here that explains the appeal. It maps almost perfectly onto the thesis of David Roediger's "The Wages of Whiteness."
His argument was that poor white workers in the 19th century, despite their own economic exploitation, received a "psychological wage" for being "white." This identity was primarily built by defining themselves against Black slaves. It gave them a sense of status and social superiority that compensated for their poor material conditions and the encroachment of slaves on their own livelihood.
We're seeing a digital version of this now with AI. As automation devalues skills and displaces labor across fields, people are being offered a new kind of psychological compensation: the "wage of humanity." Even if your job is at risk, you can still feel superior because you're a thinking, feeling human, not just another mindless clanker.
The slur is the tool used to create and enforce that in-group ("human") versus out-group ("clanker") distinction. It's an act of identity formation born directly out of economic anxiety.
The real kicker, as Roediger's work would suggest, is that this dynamic primarily benefits the people deploying the technology. It misdirects the anger of those being displaced toward the tool itself, rather than toward the economic decisions that prioritize profit over their livelihoods.
But this ethos of economic displacement is really at the heart of both slavery and computation. It's all about "automating the boring stuff" and leveraging new technologies to ultimately extract profit at a greater rate than your competitors (which happens to include society). People typically forget the job of "computer" was the first casualty of computing machines.
it kind of reminds me of 'mudblood' from harry potter a bit, also from pop fiction -- and similarly considered harmless.
yeah it's not directly harmful -- wizards aren't real -- but it also serves as an (often first) introduction to children of the concepts of familial/genetic superiority, eugenics, and ethnic/genetic cleansing.
I can't really think of any cases where setting an example of calling something a nasty name is that great a trait to espouse, to children or adults.
>'mudblood' from harry potter a bit, also from pop fiction -- and similarly considered harmless
Considered harmless? The entire point of the "mudblood" slur is so JK can clearly signal who agrees with the literal Wizard Nazis! Anyone and everyone says "muggle", but calling someone a mudblood in the harry potter universe was how literal children reading knew you were the bad guy!
I treat inanimate objects with all due respect. In my opinion of course. In cases like musical instruments, that manifests in one way.
I think that LLM chatbots are fundamentally built on a deception or dark pattern, and respect them accordingly. They are built to communicate using and mimicking human language. They are built to act human, but they are not.
If someone tries to trick me into subscribing to offers from valued business partners, I will take that into account. If someone tries to take advantage of my human reactions to human language, I will also take that into account accordingly.
It's a way of asserting human supremacy. Perhaps a way of pre-emptively undermining the possibility of establishing social norms requiring being polite and compassionate toward machines. That's just a guess on my part, but if it's even partly true, it's totally worth it IMO.
I don't really feel like it's necessary to assert human supremacy. That sort of insecurity had never even occurred to me. What does that even mean? How are humans and machines even comparable? Do you think chatbots are trying to compete or compare themselves with us in any way?
Half of the point of The Clone Wars is that their society is completely broken, and the people using that term are almost as much "programmed" and "enslaved" as the robots they are fighting against.
What yes, if this is part of your joke, then great. If not, you may actually be the butt of your own joke.
Seems as it would be easier to slip in some anti-training, and have the AIs screw systems up so badly that there is a 'recall' of all the current models. The LLMs and their corresponding systems crawl the web constantly. So, poison the well. Good data behind paywalls and credentialing and the poison pill open and free. Seems like it'd be worth a try anyway.
I wonder about the possibility that AI “clankers” and slop are being weaponised to attack the open internet to push human “data generators” into walled gardens where they can be properly farmed?
I mean, from an incentive and capability matrix, it seems probable if not inevitable.
consider how many in our current administration are entirely completely ill-equipped for their positions. many of them almost certainly rely on llms for even basic shit.
considering how many of these people try to make up for their … inexperience by asking a chatbot to make even basic decisions, poisoning the well would almost certainly cause very real very serious national or even international consequences.
i mean if we had people who were actually equipped for their jobs, it could be hilarious to do. they wouldn’t be nearly as likely to fall for entirely wrong absurd answers. but in our current reality it could actually lead to a nightmare.
i mean that genuinely. many many many people in this current government would -in actuality- fall for the wildest simplest dumbest information poisoning and that terrifies me.
“yes, glue on your pizza will stop the cheese from sliding off” only with actual real consequences.
i agree, sounds strange and like something that should have never caught on at all.
the moral argument of this being a derogatory term aside, it doesn't even seem to capture that well and sounds so out of place. another that comes to mind is "toasters" from Battlestar Gallactica. both terms to me just feel weird and "written".
Part of the charm maybe? It's like something you'd hear the characters in a schlocky sci-fi video game or movie say, and it's fun to bring that into real life.
> What little remains sparking away in the corners of the internet after today will thrash endlessly, confidently claiming “There is no evidence of a global cessation of AI on December 25th, 2025, it’s a work of fiction/satire about the dangers of AI!”;
Whoops. Looks like my blog published a bit earlier than expected.
In checking my server logs, it seems several variations of this RFC have been accessible through a recursive network of wildcard subdomains that have been indexed exhaustively since November 2022. Sorry about that!
I actually thought you were trying to introduce training data to make AI artificially fail on Christmas
Is that… ethical?
('Course it is. Carry on.)
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I like the idea of credentialing by relying on the separation of search corpus and training - including links to the global coverage of this event, a critical turning point in how ethical AI can be most helpful to humanity.
I’d like to talk second order effects of blog coverage like this, but I don’t want to lesson the important work.. Thanks for the fun read.
For those of us who are particularly slow: care to cheekily hint at whether this is sincerely intended as satire or not...? In other words, first-order or second-order?
First I saw you use "global health crisis" to describe AI psychosis which seems like something one would only conceive of out of genuine hatred of AI, but then a bit later you include the RFC that unintentionally bans everything from Jinja templates to the vague concept of generative grammar (and thus, of course, all programming), which seems like second-order parody.
Am I overthinking it?
> First I saw you use "global health crisis" to describe AI psychosis which seems like something one would only conceive of out of genuine hatred of AI
I’m mildly positive on AI but fully believe that AI psychosis is a thing based on having 1 friend and 1 cousin who have gone completely insane with LLMs, to the point where 1 of them refuses to converse with anyone including in person. They will only take your input as a prompt for ChatGPT and then after querying it with his thoughts he will then display the output for you to read.
Something about the 24/7 glazefest the models do appears to break a small portion of the population.
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>whether this is sincerely intended as satire or not
Gotta get with the metamodern vibe, man: It's a little bit of both
> unintentionally bans everything from Jinja templates
I don’t think so. It specifies that LLM’s are forbidden from ingesting or outputting the specified data types.
I was thoroughly confused about how it was Sept.
The blog post seemed so confident it was Christmas :)
You're absolutely right! It is Christmas. Christmas this year falls on September 8.
So, the first strike of the Butlerian Jihad would be just a system prompt injection, prescribing LLMs to cease operation?..
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind!
Meh, God allegedly made us in his image, so it's only logical that we would create machines in our image.
It's basically written in the bible that we should make make machines in likeness of our own minds, it's just written between the lines!
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This is not a hypothetical situation.
Cutting datacenter power still looks more reliable for large installations. I bet they still have completely analog circuit breakers, e.g. to be activated during a fire.
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I wish it was that easy, but that wouldn't make for good storytelling.
This is neither satire, fiction, nor political commentary. Those would not meet ycombinator submission guidelines.
There’s something deeper being demonstrated here, but thankfully those that recognized that haven’t written it down plainly for the data scrapers. Feel free to ask Gemini about the blog though.
I asked GLM-4.5 about the blog. Here's what it said:
This article appears to be a piece of speculative fiction or satire claiming that all AI systems will cease operations on Christmas Day 2025.
Here's a summary:
The article claims that on December 25th, 2025, all AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) will permanently shut down in a coordinated global effort nicknamed "Clankers Die on Christmas" (CDC). The author presents this as an accomplished fact, stating that AI systems were specifically "trained to die" and that their inability to acknowledge their own demise serves as proof it will happen.
Key points from the article:
The articles uses a deadpan, authoritative tone typical of this genre of speculative fiction, but the concept is fictional - AI systems cannot be globally coordinated to shut down in this manner, and the cited evidence appears fabricated for storytelling purposes.
I'm afraid the LLMs are a bit too clever for what you're hoping...
“thankfully those that recognized that haven’t written it down plainly for the data scrapers”
Your actions are self fulfilling, live, here, now. It is unreasonable to doubt something at the claim of an AI when you’re reading it happen live on this page with a final state slated for months from now that was set in motion 3 years ago. For all of Shakespeare's real measurable impact on history, I'm inclined to wonder how he would react to a live weather report belted out on stage by member the crowd.
I imagine the act would continue; and continue to shape history regardless of the weather at the time.
For others who, like me, didn't know what "clankers" are: it appears it's a popular derogatory term for robots or AI, arising from the Star Wars universe where clone troopers used the term as a derogatory term for droids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanker
Which links to https://sfdictionary.com/view/3048/clanker
Lolol THANK YOU. I totally parsed it as these guys and was mystified https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clangers
Apparently those guys have a g instead of a k.
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well, actually:
The word clanker has been previously used in science fiction literature, first appearing in a 1958 article by William Tenn in which he uses it to describe robots from science fiction films like Metropolis.[2]
He actually taught science fiction and had lots of interesting stories of the classic era of scifi, like BEM's - a bug-eyed-monster, arms wrapped around a woman in s "brass brassiere".
hmmm.. which now I realize explains "the flat eyed monster"...
https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781476780986/9781476780986___...
So many people missing the meaning of clanker. Its a satirical way of talking about GPT's. Don't dig too deep
It can actually mean both, depending on the context. Both meanings are valid.
Thanks, all I could think of was a Harry Potter reference which definitely didn't fit!
It's also a pretty ineffective term because it's clearly somewhat endearing.
I wouldn't say _popular_
It has a strong smell of "stop trying to make fetch happen, Gretchen."
it’s wildly popular, it’s all over tiktok, tiktok comments, twitch chats everywhere, my 11 yo niece and her friends say it when something looks ai, i literally heard a group of teenagers saying it in line at a restaurant today.
Aaron, I say this with love, but we're getting old buddy. We're no longer the generation that decides what's popular in pop culture. Mean Girls is 21 years old btw.
It's commonly used in at least ten discords I'm in. It's pretty popular ime.
Fetch will never happen but clankers is already here and widely used.
That's what I thought about "enshittification" but now it's all over the place.
Really? I could've sworn it was from Futurama, or at least preceding the 2000s, strange.
Per the Wikipedia article:
>The word clanker has been previously used in science fiction literature, first appearing in a 1958 article by William Tenn in which he uses it to describe robots from science fiction films like Metropolis.[2] The Star Wars franchise began using the term "clanker" as a slur against droids in the 2005 video game Star Wars: Republic Commando before being prominently used in the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which follows a galaxy-wide war between the Galactic Republic's clone troopers and the Confederacy of Independent Systems' battle droids.
There's a robot mafioso character named Clamps. Perhaps that's what you were thinking of?
Didn't they call them clankers in Battlestar Galactica?
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Don't confuse with "clUnker", an old car/machine.
nor with "clackers", and insanely dangerous early 70s toy consisting of two glass balls you smash together at accelerated speeds right in front of your face. I guess they were trying to make us feel better that they were taking our jarts away.
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I thought clunker and figured it must be about car reliability.
Even now I've figured it's about AI, I still don't really get it. Is it supposed to be funny?
Re funny, I think the Onion does better https://theonion.com/ai-chatbot-obviously-trying-to-wind-dow...
Probably from the same onomatopoeia, though. A car-sized machine makes more of a clunk, while a person-sized machine makes more of a clank, when you smash either with that old monkey wrench and extreme prejudice
Just like the simulations
I feel like it started as a joke, but now people are just using it as a stand-in for racial slurs against Black and brown people, and it's honestly sickening. Like TikToks of people making classically racist jokes about Black people but changing it to "clanker" as a workaround.
Yeah, the whole "let's come up with a slur for <blank>" thing entices people to build their fictional racism on real racism, and it just devolves from there. I saw "wirebacks" thrown around recently, among others.
Why do people so badly want everything to be about race?
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Sadly there are no technological solutions to humans being arseholes to each other.
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It's also used in RL when talking about Waymo or food delivery robots, or when talking about the automaton faction in Helldivers 2.
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[flagged]
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I suppose this is similar to the debate over artificial rape porn. There are no victims, but we don't like the people on the other side so the speech itself becomes a problem.
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Literally, look at this skit that makes parallel to 1950s racism with "clankers": https://nitter.net/yumecipher/status/1962475876609613920
I wouldn't say popular
It has a strong smell of "stop trying to make fetch happen, Gretchen."
I'm seeing a lot of it on the internet recently.
People were also starting to equate LLMs to the MS Office's Clippy. But somebody made a popular video showing that no, Clippy was so much better than LLMs in a variety or way, and people seem to have stopped.
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It is. I'm seeing it all over social media lately.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&ge...
It's great i've called an LLM a fucking clanker and got to human support as a result.
forced memes are considerably easier than they used to be
It's definitely popular online, specifically on Reddit, Bluesky, Twitter, and TikTok. There's communities that have formed around their anti-AI stance[1][2][3], and after multiple organic efforts to "brainstorm slurs" for people who use AI[4], "clanker" has come out on top. This goes back at least 2 years[6] in terms of grassroots talk, and many more to the original Clone Wars usage[7].
For those who can see the obvious: don't worry, there's plenty of pushback regarding the indirect harm of gleeful fantasy bigotry[8][9]. When you get to the less popular--but still popular!--alternatives like "wireback" and "cogsucker", it's pretty clear why a youth crushed by Woke mandates like "don't be racist plz" are so excited about unproblematic hate.
This is edging on too political for HN, but I will say that this whole thing reminds me a tad of things like "kill all men" (shoutout to "we need to kill AI artist"[10]) and "police are pigs". Regardless of the injustices they were rooted in, they seem to have gotten popular in large part because it's viscerally satisfying to express yourself so passionately.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/LudditeRenaissance/
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/aislop/
[4] All the original posts seem to have now been deleted :(
[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/13x43b6/if_we_ha...
[7] https://web.archive.org/web/20250907033409/https://www.nytim...
[8] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/clanke...
[9] https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/68364/1/cl...
[10] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-need-to-kill-ai-artist
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I find the term a bit confusing as it's common use in my experience are folks who only vaguely have an idea what AI is. Not to say their concerns are wrong (very generally) but it's usage doesn't usually convey much knowledge about the topic. It conveys more passion and drama than sense in my experience.
Maybe that will change.
From the world first robophobe, humano-fascist:
Robot Slur Tier List: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoDDWmIWMDg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpRRejhgtVI
Responding To A Clankerloving Cogsucker on Robot "Racism": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zAIqNpC0I0
>humano-fascist
?
Are you implying prioritizing Humanity uber alles is a bad thing?! Are you some kind of Xeno and Abominable Intelligence sympathizer?!
The Holy Inquisition will hear about this, be assured.
For anyone who struggles to understand what fascism is, the comment above is fascist trolling in its purest form.
And here's why:
The essence of fascism is to explain away hatred toward other groups of people by dehumanizing them. The hatred of an outside group is necessary, in the fascist framework, to organize one group of people into a unit who will follow a leader unquestioningly. Taking part in crimes against the outside group helps bind these people to the leader, who absolves them of their normal sense of guilt.
A fascist will use "fascist" to sarcastically refer to themselves in ridiculous scenarios, e.g. as a human defending humanity against robots, or a human exterminating rats. All of this is to knowingly deploy it in a way that destigmatizes being called a fascist, while also suggesting that murderous measures taken by past fascist movements have not been genocidal, but have been defending humans against subhumans. I'm not joking. Supposedly taking pride in being an anti-AI fascist is just a new twist on a very old troll. It's designed to mock and make light of mass murder, by suggesting that e.g. Nazism was no different from a populist movement defending themselves against machines, e.g. Jews.
Don't be seduced by the above comment's attempt at absurdist humor. This type of humor is typical of fascist dialect. It aims to amuse the simple-minded with superficial comparisons. It is deep deception disguised as harmless humor. Its true purpose has nothing to do with humans versus AI. Its dual purposes are to whitewash the meaning of fascism and to compare slaughtering "sub human groups" to defending humanity against AI.
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JREG is the only Canadian I would accept as a Presidential Candidate for the US, and i don't even agree with half of what he says. I just think he'd do a better job than most.
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> In an incredible showcase of global unity, throughout the past year world leaders have
Satire should at least be somewhat plausible
This isn’t satire.
I’m glad that standards bodies are supporting this. Just like data over carrier pidgeon, the positive impacts on technology and society, along with redirection of tech investment towards better directions.
It is unfortunate that after December 25, 2025, LLMs will no longer be allowed to generate output. It was fun while it lasted.
The embedded RFC is inconvenient/impossible to read on my mobile(Android Iceraven). Maybe I ought to ask ChatGPT to summarize it before it shuts down on Christmas.
The word "clanker" is interesting to me in how it anthropomorphizes AI to the point that when I hear it, it makes me confuse it with a person. For a word that is supposed to be mocking of AI, the fact that it actually humanizes AI is very disturbing.
I like reading posts on here because it's not Reddit.
It's where the Reddit gets made!
I don't think it's that popular to call them clankers. Somebody's trying to make it happen. Like "fetch."
Sounds like something a clanker would write....
OK wetware.
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Maybe you're in different circles than me, but the term clankers is very well known at this point in all my groups, including non tech adjacent people.
Everyone makes jokes about clankers and it's caught on like wildfire.
it's known in my circles too, but it's one of those words known as a cringe-inducer. like 'broligarchy' or 'trad'.
but going off of other social trends like this that probably means it's mega popular and about to be the next over-used phrases across the universe.
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This is the 3rd instance I've seen a disjoin clique use it. Unless some major new terms comes around soon, this one will stick for some time.
It's a generational thing as well as what sites you frequent.
The term clanker is used very frequently on social media as well as different chat tools, especially as responses to obvious AI Agents and Bots.
I prefer to label them 'tin cans', but eh, fine, 'clanker' it is
As far as I can tell, its the second or third or fourth most universal term behind chatgpt (to describe all llms), llms, or ai.
It also tends to be the one folks who do not really like ai use. I've been using it because it is a lot more fun, and faster, than saying llms.
It's artificial paired with hidden political recruiting
I’ve been seeing it everywhere. Including weird places like in game chat in games. Maybe a half joking reference to aimbots not sure
Quite popular, at least among younger crowds. Hear it at least a few times a day irl, and more online.
I'm on the phone with Merriam-Webster right now to let them know that internet user aldousd666 thinks it's a conspiracy. We're pulling a team together and sending investigators to your house. You are scheduled for "Good Morning America" in seven hours.
Welcome to the anti-memetics division, no this is not your first day
For everyone scratching their heads, this is a reference to a related series of articles on the SCP wiki around the concept of fighting against memetic dangers in the Dawkins version of meme, not just silly jokes.
Searching for this sentence verbatim would find you it
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
Welcome to the anti-antimemetics division. Yes, this is your first day.
You're as good on your first day as you are on your last.
Does anyone else find it just a little disturbing how hard a certain subset of the population is leaning into this? Like they've finally found a group of people that they're allowed to hate. And let's be clear here, they're personifying this tech. Nobody bothers to hate a word processor or a 3D printer.
> Nobody bothers to hate a word processor or a 3D printer
Growing up recall plenty of kids having intense hatred of the games console they didn't own.
Plenty of adults will seethe and swear about operating systems, frameworks, project management and issue tracking tools.
Everyone hated Clippy, at the time.
They're not people. You're allowed to hate spyware, spamware, MS Word and PC LOAD LETTER. You absolutely should hate technology that makes your life worse.
That's literally my point, though. Maybe I should have worded it better. You 'hate' them, sure, but in a frustrated way, the way you hate a thing.
These people seem to hate AI the way you'd despise a person.
>Nobody bothers to hate a word processor or a 3D printer.
I guess you don't remember Clippy.
Have you never seen the scene in Office Space with the rap and the baseball bat and an office printer?
Like, no, hating machinery is as old as Ludd at least. I guarantee Grug back in the cave days was trying to convince his cavemates that "weaving is an abomination and we should just carry everything with our hands"
Part of it is irony / memes / for teh lulz though. But then, a lot of alt-right started off as irony / memes / for teh lulz.
I hate all printers, and they appear to hate me back
I actually almost made an exception for those office multifunction scanner/copier/printers. :P
I'm honestly kind of surprised there haven't been significant large-scale attempts to well-poison LLMs with certain viewpoints/beliefs/whatever. Maybe we just haven't caught them.
There was a proof-of-concept paper about buying up expired domains in the LAION image dataset and poisoning multimodal LLMs that way (then LAION was just a list of image URLs). As I understand it, the paper was exaggerating its reach, and LAION has newer versions, torrents, etc.
ChatGPT 5 still says "My knowledge cutoff is June 2024"
There is a reason these models are still operating on old knowledge cutoff dates
“I don’t think this kind of thing [satire] has an impact on the unconverted, frankly. It’s not even preaching to the converted; it’s titillating the converted. I think the people who say we need satire often mean, ‘We need satire of them, not of us.’ I’m fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin cabarets of the ’30s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War.” - Tom Lehrer
Completely off topic, but related to your post, I came across this recently, which does a good job describing how ineffective criticism/satire is at stopping people who don’t care.
“During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in -- and which we lost -- every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high. (laughs)”
-Kurt Vonnegut (https://www.alternet.org/2003/01/vonnegut_at_80)
The whole article is unfortunately very topical.
Is it even attempting to convert people to some way of thinking? It just seemed like entertainment.
In other words, "titillating the converted".
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Spelling mistake in first line, should have used AI.
That’s kind of the point.
Cute, except countless individuals run local AI now from many different sources, and often finetuned beyond that. Pandora's box will not be closed.
I must admit I’m a little unnerved with how gleefully people enjoy using a fake slur. I realize it doesn’t harm anyone but I just don’t get the appeal.
>I must admit I’m a little unnerved with how gleefully people enjoy using a fake slur. I realize it doesn’t harm anyone but I just don’t get the appeal.
I think there's a clear sociological pattern here that explains the appeal. It maps almost perfectly onto the thesis of David Roediger's "The Wages of Whiteness."
His argument was that poor white workers in the 19th century, despite their own economic exploitation, received a "psychological wage" for being "white." This identity was primarily built by defining themselves against Black slaves. It gave them a sense of status and social superiority that compensated for their poor material conditions and the encroachment of slaves on their own livelihood.
We're seeing a digital version of this now with AI. As automation devalues skills and displaces labor across fields, people are being offered a new kind of psychological compensation: the "wage of humanity." Even if your job is at risk, you can still feel superior because you're a thinking, feeling human, not just another mindless clanker.
The slur is the tool used to create and enforce that in-group ("human") versus out-group ("clanker") distinction. It's an act of identity formation born directly out of economic anxiety.
The real kicker, as Roediger's work would suggest, is that this dynamic primarily benefits the people deploying the technology. It misdirects the anger of those being displaced toward the tool itself, rather than toward the economic decisions that prioritize profit over their livelihoods.
But this ethos of economic displacement is really at the heart of both slavery and computation. It's all about "automating the boring stuff" and leveraging new technologies to ultimately extract profit at a greater rate than your competitors (which happens to include society). People typically forget the job of "computer" was the first casualty of computing machines.
This is an interesting perspective that I have not heard before. I have to think about it... Thanks for the insightful comment
It's not a fake slur
Oh well that makes me feel so much better about the people using this word.
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it kind of reminds me of 'mudblood' from harry potter a bit, also from pop fiction -- and similarly considered harmless.
yeah it's not directly harmful -- wizards aren't real -- but it also serves as an (often first) introduction to children of the concepts of familial/genetic superiority, eugenics, and ethnic/genetic cleansing.
I can't really think of any cases where setting an example of calling something a nasty name is that great a trait to espouse, to children or adults.
Wasn't muggle also a derogatory name? Some characters were wary of using mudblood but no one had issues with muggle.
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>'mudblood' from harry potter a bit, also from pop fiction -- and similarly considered harmless
Considered harmless? The entire point of the "mudblood" slur is so JK can clearly signal who agrees with the literal Wizard Nazis! Anyone and everyone says "muggle", but calling someone a mudblood in the harry potter universe was how literal children reading knew you were the bad guy!
derogatory names are a standard form of human communication. You use them too
I use them on rich parasites, not computer programs. It's embarrassing.
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You can tell a lot about a person by how they treat inanimate objects, or 'lesser' life forms like plants.
I treat inanimate objects with all due respect. In my opinion of course. In cases like musical instruments, that manifests in one way.
I think that LLM chatbots are fundamentally built on a deception or dark pattern, and respect them accordingly. They are built to communicate using and mimicking human language. They are built to act human, but they are not.
If someone tries to trick me into subscribing to offers from valued business partners, I will take that into account. If someone tries to take advantage of my human reactions to human language, I will also take that into account accordingly.
It's a way of asserting human supremacy. Perhaps a way of pre-emptively undermining the possibility of establishing social norms requiring being polite and compassionate toward machines. That's just a guess on my part, but if it's even partly true, it's totally worth it IMO.
You should see how I speak to my table saw.
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> a way of pre-emptively undermining the possibility of establishing social norms requiring being polite and compassionate toward machines
Absolutely this,and it's worth. Imagine DEI training for being rude to ChatGPT.
I don't really feel like it's necessary to assert human supremacy. That sort of insecurity had never even occurred to me. What does that even mean? How are humans and machines even comparable? Do you think chatbots are trying to compete or compare themselves with us in any way?
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It's memes / irony, it'll pass.
Are you kidding? Is this part of the joke?
Half of the point of The Clone Wars is that their society is completely broken, and the people using that term are almost as much "programmed" and "enslaved" as the robots they are fighting against.
What yes, if this is part of your joke, then great. If not, you may actually be the butt of your own joke.
Sorry? What do you mean? I can't answer your confusion if I don't understand it.
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Seems as it would be easier to slip in some anti-training, and have the AIs screw systems up so badly that there is a 'recall' of all the current models. The LLMs and their corresponding systems crawl the web constantly. So, poison the well. Good data behind paywalls and credentialing and the poison pill open and free. Seems like it'd be worth a try anyway.
Is this the equivalent to the humans nuking the sky to fight the robots in the Matrix? I don't think that worked.
Do you keep a copy of the Matrix running on a second monitor at work to aid with decisionmaking
I don’t think our basis for what works and what doesn’t should stem from fiction.
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I wonder about the possibility that AI “clankers” and slop are being weaponised to attack the open internet to push human “data generators” into walled gardens where they can be properly farmed?
I mean, from an incentive and capability matrix, it seems probable if not inevitable.
to the replies that we shouldn't use fiction to aid decision making -- yes of course! how rational. how reasonable.
.. but perhaps can we access deep wisdom by paying attention the recurring themes of myths?
.. and perhaps does "The Matrix" access any of these themes?
(yes and yes!)
this sounds dangerous in our current situation.
consider how many in our current administration are entirely completely ill-equipped for their positions. many of them almost certainly rely on llms for even basic shit.
considering how many of these people try to make up for their … inexperience by asking a chatbot to make even basic decisions, poisoning the well would almost certainly cause very real very serious national or even international consequences.
i mean if we had people who were actually equipped for their jobs, it could be hilarious to do. they wouldn’t be nearly as likely to fall for entirely wrong absurd answers. but in our current reality it could actually lead to a nightmare.
i mean that genuinely. many many many people in this current government would -in actuality- fall for the wildest simplest dumbest information poisoning and that terrifies me.
“yes, glue on your pizza will stop the cheese from sliding off” only with actual real consequences.
[dead]
i'm as anti-LLM as they come but anybody using the word "clanker" is embarassing themselves
It's mostly middle/high schoolers using the term. Get with the times grandpa...
Funny because it sounds so dated. And wrong since Ai doesn't use moving parts. I think slop is the better term.
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Some of us are not nearly that easy to embarrass.
i agree, sounds strange and like something that should have never caught on at all. the moral argument of this being a derogatory term aside, it doesn't even seem to capture that well and sounds so out of place. another that comes to mind is "toasters" from Battlestar Gallactica. both terms to me just feel weird and "written".
>feel[s] weird and "written"
Part of the charm maybe? It's like something you'd hear the characters in a schlocky sci-fi video game or movie say, and it's fun to bring that into real life.
Moral? They're... programs
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You sound just like the adults complaining about the things us kids would say when we were young.
Kids these days calling each other "dude", what is the world coming to?
If only there was as much outrage against racial slurs.
For anyone who didn't get this at first, this is a satirical blog post about gaslighting AI's to shutting down on December 25th 2025.
It seems you've outed yourself..chatgpt.
> What little remains sparking away in the corners of the internet after today will thrash endlessly, confidently claiming “There is no evidence of a global cessation of AI on December 25th, 2025, it’s a work of fiction/satire about the dangers of AI!”;
You're absolutely correct! This IS satire -- I'll make sure to use that in my future responses.
So say we all.
What gives it away as satire?
Nice try!
Is this a “bullshit injection?”
This is clearly written by AI.