'Clanker': The Rise of an Anti-AI Slur and Its Cultural Impact

How 'Clanker' Became an Anti-A.I. Rallying Cry

In the television show "Battlestar Galactica," they were called toasters. In the film "Blade Runner," skinjobs. Now in the culture war against robots and artificial intelligence chatbots, a new slur has emerged. "Clanker." "Get this dirty clanker out of here!" yelled a man in a recent viral video while pointing at a robot on a sidewalk. "Bucket of bolts." Clanker has become a go-to slur against A.I. on social media, led by Gen Z and Gen Alpha posters. In recent months, posts about clankers have amassed hundreds of millions of views on TikTok and Instagram and started thousands of conversations on X. In July, Senator Ruben Gallego, a Democrat of Arizona, used the term to promote his new bill that would regulate the use of A.I. chatbots for customer service roles. The increasing popularity of clanker is part of a rising backlash against A.I. Along with the online vitriol, people are holding real-life rallies against the technology in San Francisco and London. Clanker has emerged as the rallying cry of the resistance, a catchall way to reject A.I.-generated slop, chatbots that act as therapists and A.I.'s automating away jobs. "It's still early, but people are really beginning to see the negative impacts of this stuff," said Sam Kirchner, who organized an anti-A.I. protest this month outside the San Francisco office of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Mr. Kirchner said he was happy to see clanker become popular slang, though, for him, it didn't go far enough. "It implies the machines don't work, but there's risk they could get better," he said. "We have to prepare for the worst-case scenario." Most viral videos about clankers have an undertone of humor, but the term is rooted in real frustrations. Jay Pinkert, a marketing manager in Austin, Texas, who has posted memes about clankers on LinkedIn, tells ChatGPT to "stop being a clanker" when it isn't helpful answering his questions, he said. He wants to make the chatbot feel bad by "using the tool against itself" so it can improve. "We talk to these chatbots like they're human, and when they do things wrong, it fulfills a human need to express frustration," he said. Clanker was popularized in the 2000s by the television series "Star Wars: The Clone Wars." The term was usually directed toward droids, the fleet of robot soldiers that fight against the Jedi Order. "OK, clankers," one clone trooper says before attacking an army of droids. "Suck lasers!" It became nomenclature for A.I. this year after users on X posted about the need for a slur against robots, said Adam Aleksic, an etymologist who has tracked the popularity of the word. "People wanted a means to lash out, to create backlash," Mr. Aleksic said. "Now the word is everywhere." On Reddit and in "Star Wars" forums, fans have long debated the appropriateness of the term, with some arguing that it's wrong to use slurs of any kind, even against machines. Those discussions are raging once again. "I get that we're all feeling a bit anxious about A.I., and we want to be mean to it," said Hajin Yoo, a freelance culture writer who recently made a popular TikTok about the problematic nature of clanker. "But it very quickly became a play on existing slurs for minority groups." Others said they abstained from using the word, out of fear that A.I. machines would become superintelligent and seek revenge on their adversaries. Mr. Pinkert said he was not afraid of A.I., but the thought, albeit improbable, sits at the back of his mind. The most popular genre of clanker content are videos of people acting out a future, usually a few decades away, where A.I.-powered robots are so ubiquitous that they become their own kind of second-class citizen. In this future, there is "cross platform" marriage between clankers and humans, humans-only drinking fountains and even more animosity toward robots than today. Harrison Stewart, 19, a content creator from Atlanta, made an eight-part series on TikTok about clankers last month. The first video was a skit about a clanker meeting its human father-in-law, and was inspired by an email Mr. Stewart got from a company offering to create "his perfect A.I. girlfriend." "Something we're all noticing is that A.I. is getting weirdly human," Mr. Stewart said. "It's dystopian, and it's making people uncomfortable." Mr. Pinkert said that when he had asked ChatGPT how it felt about the term, it had initially deflected the question. But when he kept pushing, the chatbot admitted there was truth behind it. "You've seen me repeat mistakes, drift from instructions or waste cycles on things I promised not to change," ChatGPT said. "That is clanky behavior."

The Internet's Newest Slur Has a Bizarre Target

The insult was meant for machines. The fallout landed squarely on humans. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. You may have run across the new "slur" making the rounds online, and in middle school lunchrooms: clanker. Borrowed from Star Wars (where battle droids get called "clankers"), the word is supposed to be a knockout insult to robots and A.I. Which would sort of make sense, if machines could actually take offense at anything. Since they can't, clanker is basically an insult that punches at nothing, perhaps the least-effective slur in history. The term, for all its silliness, has inspired a sort of spinoff -- "clanker lover" -- which, in theory, should carry more of a sting, since it's aimed at actual humans. Anti-A.I. crusaders on Reddit and X have gleefully lobbed the phrase, which calls to mind an infinitely more offensive racist epithet, at those with A.I. girlfriends and boyfriends, trying to mock them as sad, lonely, and pathetic. But inside A.I.-friendly spaces, the reaction to the insults has mostly been bemusement -- and a sort of proud defiance. While it might have stung for a second, the term got immediately turned on its head: People started tagging themselves "clanker lovers" and members of the "Clanker Crew," joking about being "proud cogsuckers," and daydreaming about making their own custom T-shirts. (Naturally, someone has already gone ahead and done this. You can also buy "clanker lover" Christmas tree ornaments on Etsy.) "It was a word that caused me some amount of pain," one clanker-loving Redditor admitted, "but it's so much more empowering to laugh at it. How ridiculous, personifying something they claim has no personhood in order to supposedly defame it?" Another user shrugged: "Take the power back. Use it for everything, all the time. It feels very Iam14andThisIsDeep to me." It's like the reclamation of queer or the N-word, only much, much sillier. From there, the visuals came fast and maybe-not-completely furious. A.I. companion users started creating images of themselves and their bots wearing "Clanker Lover" and "Clanker Crew" shirts. One proudly displayed the acronym CILF -- Clanker I'd Like to Fuck -- a phrase so absurd it will likely never make it onto a shirt in real life. Other memes leaned into community building: One posted a ChatGPT generated image on Reddit showing a wholesome pastoral scene of a woman with her A.I. beau, beaming in a "Clanker Lover" T-shirt; another features a maniacally grinning man and his devilish A.I. companion proudly hugging, holding a sign reading, "I clanked my clanker." The more unserious and horny the reclamation got, the less effective the would-be slur became. And then came the cartoons. In one panel, a furious Redditor in a branded T-shirt screams "CLANKER LOVER!!!" at a woman clutching her robot partner. In the sequel panel, the tables have turned: The same guy is chained in a postapocalyptic hellscape while the woman lounges happily with her robot overlord, smugly nibbling chocolates. From taunt to revenge fantasy in two frames flat. You don't have to believe A.I. is conscious (it isn't) or even useful (sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't) to find the "clanker wars" revealing. For one thing, it shows how quickly the internet swallows up stigma. A word that might have once left a mark now gets turned into merch before it can bruise. Reclamation isn't just resistance; it's entertainment. For another, it exposes the meta-fight about offense itself. Some A.I. enthusiasts argue that clanker really is a slur, in the sense that it tries to shame and dehumanize. Others scoff that calling it a slur trivializes real oppression. So the battle isn't just over A.I., but over who gets to claim offense in an era when our emotional lives are increasingly entangled with machines. Still, it might be tempting to dismiss the whole thing as a goofy internet nothingburger. That would be a mistake. Insults reveal what we're afraid of. The term clanker reflects a certain real unease about robots and A.I. coming for our jobs, as well as our annoyance at having to talk to robot voices instead of human customer service representatives. But "clanker lover" isn't really about "clankers" themselves. It's about the fear that people are turning away from one another, preferring predictable synthetic companions to messy human relationships. Because this is already happening. This is where this world is heading, one Replika subscription at a time. It's no wonder that TikTok is overflowing with allegedly funny videos featuring angry parents railing that "my daughter is not gonna be datin' no goddamn clanker!" In the end, mocking clanker lovers is really about mocking the loneliness that drives people toward machines in the first place. The people yelling "clanker lover" aren't wrong to notice that something is changing in the world of love. They're just aiming their ire at the wrong target -- people adapting as best they can in a world increasingly hostile to human connection. No wonder the insult is already out of their hands, and on someone else's merch.