Name: Clanker.<\/p>\n
Age: 20 years old.<\/p>\n
Appearance: Everywhere, but mostly on social media.<\/p>\n
It sounds a bit insulting. It is, in fact, a slur.<\/p>\n
What kind of slur? A slur against robots.<\/p>\n
Because they\u2019re metal? While it\u2019s sometimes used to denigrate actual robots \u2013 including delivery bots and self-driving cars \u2013 it\u2019s increasingly used to insult AI chatbots and platforms such as ChatGPT.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m new to this \u2013 why would I want to insult AI? For making up information, peddling outright falsehoods, generating \u201cslop\u201d (lame or obviously fake content) or simply not being human enough.<\/p>\n
Does the AI care that you\u2019re insulting it? That\u2019s a complex and hotly debated philosophical question, to which the answer is \u201cno\u201d.<\/p>\n
Then why bother? People are taking out their frustrations on a technology that is becoming pervasive, intrusive and may well threaten their future employment.<\/p>\n
Clankers, coming over here, taking our jobs! That\u2019s the idea.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And is it really the best we can do, insult-wise? Popular culture has spawned other anti-robot slurs \u2013 there\u2019s \u201ctoaster\u201d from Battlestar Galactica, and \u201cskin-job\u201d from Blade Runner \u2013 but \u201cclanker\u201d seems to have won out for now.<\/p>\n
It seems like a stupid waste of time, but I guess it\u2019s harmless enough. You say that, but many suggest using \u201cclanker\u201d could help to normalise actual bigotry.<\/p>\n
Oh, come on now. Popular memes and spoof videos tend to treat \u201cclanker\u201d as being directly analogous to a racial slur \u2013 suggesting a future where we all harass robots as if they were an oppressed minority.<\/p>\n
So what? They\u2019re just clankers. \u201cNaturally, when we trend in that direction, it does play into those tropes of how people have treated marginalised communities before,\u201d says linguist Adam Aleksic.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not anti-robot; I just wouldn\u2019t want my daughter to marry one. Can you hear how that sounds?<\/p>\n
I have a feeling we\u2019re going to be very embarrassed about all this in 10 years. Probably. Some people argue that, by insulting AI, we\u2019re crediting it with a level of humanity it doesn\u2019t warrant.<\/p>\n