Comment by newfocogi
1 month ago
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.
"Clangers (usually referred to as The Clangers)[2] is a British stop-motion animated children's television series, consisting of short films about a family of mouse-like creatures who live on, and inside, a small moon-like planet. They speak only in a whistled language, and eat green soup (supplied by the Soup Dragon) and blue string pudding."
Sounds like early 70s.
"The programmes were originally broadcast on BBC1 between 1969 and 1972, followed by a special episode which was broadcast in 1974."
What else!
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I thought it was this again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conkers
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that would be very sad christmas :D
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?
Toasters?
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And canner in I, robot (the movie).
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.
Thanks for the reminder of that! This girl who sat behind me in second grade was great with clackers. Also, my memory is a bit foggy, but I don't think the jart ban was until eigth grade. So no causality there. Pop Rocks causing internal explosions and spider eggs in Bubble Yum occured somewhere between Clackers and Jarts. :-)
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The original form of clackers had a popularity in Indonesia and Philippines where it's named latto-latto.
There was also a safer revival of clackers in North America in the 90s, where the balls are attached to a handle.
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?
Racial profiling is now legal: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/us/politics/supreme-court...
What do you mean specifically?
Fragility.
Nobody wants it to be, but wanting something to not be about racism doesn't make it not about racism.
Jim Crow "ended" (it's what we tell ourselves) in the south in 1965 with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Our last two presidents were adults when that happened, and it's not like racism was solved when those laws were passed.
The US still has a lot of work to do here - it's absurd to me to hear US Conservatives talking about how slavery ended in the 1860s so we should end protections for African Americans because it's been "so long". It hasn't, and they know that.
... Because most things involve race?
Like, clanker is the equivalent of a racial slur but for robots. The reason it works and is funny is because we already know what racial slurs are and have a contexr for it.
If racial slurs didn't exist, neither would clanker.
You have to actually think about the world we live in and why things are the way they are. Its a easy to say "just cuz lol", but we're engineers. Nothing happens "just cuz". No, there's a reason.
Perhaps because it's a fictional slur that is cleary a play on the n-word, a real racist slur?
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Sadly there are no technological solutions to humans being arseholes to each other.
Well, I mean, we did invent Nuclear Weapons…. That’s a type of technical solution!
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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.
Helldivers is excessively/satirically facist and xenophobic though, I mean uh, managed democracy, rah rah!
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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.
>We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
- Kurt Vonnegut
and
>If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.
>A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.
- Roald Dahl
You're an idiot if you truly think that's the issue with "artificial rape". Go inform yourself instead of reflexively defending your in-group.
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.
"Clippy just wanted to help."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_Dtmpe9qaQ
And before Clippy we had Microsoft BoB! Super popular as I recall...
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
Citations eight and nine amuse me.
I readily and merrily agree with the articles that deriving slurs from existing racist or homophobic slurs is a problem, and the use of these terms in fashions that mirror actual racial stereotypes (e.g. "clanka") is pretty gross.
That said, I think that asking people to treat ChatGPT with "kindness and respect" is patently embarrassing. We don't ask people to be nice to their phone's autocorrect, or to Siri, or to the forks in their silverware drawer, because that's stupid.
ChatGPT deserves no more or less empathy than a fork does, and asking for such makes about as much sense.
Additionally, I'm not sure where the "crushed by Woke" nonsense comes from. "It's so hard for the kids nowadays, they can't even be racist anymore!" is a pretty strange take, and shoving it in to your comment makes it very difficult to interpret your intent in a generous manner, whatever it may be.
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>after multiple organic efforts to "brainstorm slurs" for people who use AI
no wonder it sounds so lame, it was "brainstormed" (=RLHFed) by committee of redditors
this is like the /r/vexillology of slurs
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.
Does that include those who dehumanize other groups of people by calling them fascists, or is there a "no-backsies" situation going on here?
Jreg is not a fascist. He is an anti Zionist jew.
This is sort of like calling The Producers fascist propaganda.
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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.
TBH the bar is on the floor at the moment.