The Rise of 'Clanker': How a Star Wars Term Became a Slur for AI and Robots

The 'Star Wars' Slur That Has Been Mainstreamed by Anti-AI Discourse

"Clanker." You've probably heard the term online a lot lately, as growing wariness of the acceptance of generative AI has led to an almost science-fictional world of anti-robot sentiment. It's become an increasingly common derogatory term, growing beyond the constraints of referring to chatbots and image generators to refer to any kind of non-human robotic intelligence. It's perhaps fitting then, as it penetrates increasingly mainstream social circles, that "Clanker" itself is rooted in science fictionâ€"and, in particular, a world where the relationship between organic and synthetic life has long been complicated. That world is, of course, Star Wars. "Clanker" is a term as old as the prequel era itself: it first appears in Star Wars media in the 2005 video game Republic Commandoâ€"a tie-in set around the events of the Clone Wars and Revenge of the Sith that would go on to inspire its own (occasionally controversial) legacy across both the then-expanded universe and ultimately contemporary Star Wars continuity. There, it's a derogatory remark sometimes used by one of the game's titular commandos in Delta Squad, Sev, who would occasionally refer to droid opponents mid-combat as "lousy clankers." The term rose to further popularity in Star Wars a few years later with the launch of the Clone Wars 3DCG animated series in 2008. There, much like it was in Republic Commando, "Clanker" became a commonplace term used by Republic troopers to refer to the droid forces of the Separatist armiesâ€"and explained by Obi-Wan Kenobi himself during the season two episode "Voyage of Temptation" as shorthand describing the mechanical clanking sound made by battle droids. Since then, the term has taken off in both Star Wars itself and in Star Wars fandom circles. While the penetration of "Clanker" itself spread to being a derogatory term for any kind of droid, Separatist or otherwise (it's even been retroactively established as being in existence as early as the era of the High Republic, two centuries before the events of the films), within fandom, the term has mostly been fodder for memes and jokes, paralleling the term's proximity to real-world slurs. It's only been in the summer of 2025 that "clanker" has entered mainstream viral trends. Emerging on platforms like TikTok, the term evolved from Star Wars-specific memes and jokes to become the subject of several viral videos where the term is used to refer to more conventional modern-day robots, from food delivery to automated call center operativesâ€"and then, making the leap from there to indicate disdain for generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Midjourney. Search for the term now and you'll find multiple viral posts using "clanker" derogatorily or remarking on its status as an almost dystopic evolution of language, or, of course, Star Wars fans trying to remind you that they had it first. But it's perhaps fitting that, regardless of the number of sci-fi franchises about robot-ruled dystopias, it was Star Wars that gave us a mainstreamed slur for artificial intelligences. From the very beginning of the series, C-3PO and R2-D2 were sold into indentured servitude; we see Wuher, the Mos Eisley Cantina bartender, snarling, "We don't serve their kind"â€"synthetic life has always been treated as second-class in the galaxy far, far away. It would take years for expanded material to try and justify the horrors of what posing the simple question "Are droids people?" even raised, and it's taken longer still for Star Wars to even really grapple with the idea of what it means to treat a droid as any form of sentient life. And yet, here we are with "Clanker." Star Wars has still yet to make any kind of profound leap with the rights of droids in its storytelling. Some select few are given equitable personhood, like Artoo and Threepio, but otherwise droids exist to be enslaved in some form or another, fodder that perpetually avoids the question of what it means to live a life of indentured existence, humanoid forms that are treated inhumanely. Of course, in our world, artificial intelligence is far from the level of droid sentience seen in Star Wars, no matter what any Silicon Valley tech bro tells you when they laud the arrival of generative AI as, to borrow parlance from another sci-fi franchise, futile to resist. But in an age of skepticism over even the minor roles such intelligence can play in our modern lives, maybe it's only fair we turn to one of the most mainstream fictional universes to depict widespread anti-robot sentiment to find the tools to communicate our own disdain... even if those tools have some pretty questionable roots.

It's 2025, the year we decided we need a widespread slur for robots

A pair of 1X androids are displayed at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) at ExCel on May 30, 2023 in London, England. Leon Neal/Getty Images Europe hide caption Debate over the song of the summer rages on, but if there were a contest for a word of the summer, one front runner would surely be the onomatopoeiac, clanker. In recent weeks clanker has risen to viral levels on TikTok and Instagram. One popular video from July shows a delivery robot on wheels - the kind that looks like a mobile cooler with flashing lights that look like eyes - stopped on a patch of grass on the side of a road. As a man and woman drive past it, they point and shout, "Filthy ... Get these off the streets. Clanker! Clanker! Clanker!" Even with little background, it's clear from context clues that clanker is not a good thing, but in this installment of Word of the Week we will answer - what exactly does it mean? Adam Aleksic, a linguist, author and content creator best known across social media as the @etomologynerd, told NPR it's a derogatory term for robots that stems from the Star Wars universe dating back to 2005. "It was referenced in Star Wars and in the Clone Wars series. They would call robots clankers because of the sound they made. It clearly implies clanking. ... And then we adopted it because it sounds useful." While other sci-fi franchises and fandoms have created their own lexicon that included robot slurs -- Battlestar Galactica and Blade Runner both used skin-job as a pejorative for human-appearing robots -- Aleksic said, those terms didn't really catch on because they didn't make as much sense. He noted that clanker has already had a long life on Star Wars' subreddits, specifically subreddits about the Battlefront video game, and as a meme, where people use it to belittle robots. The reason clanker is going mainstream now is because it's fulfilling a need as we see more robots in our everyday lives, according to Aleksic. And he adds, it has now evolved to generative AI platforms like ChatGPT. "I remember tweets from January of this year where people were saying, 'Oh, we need a slur for AI' And finally, it seems like that cultural need is being met," he said. Just last week, Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., promoted his latest bill on X, using the insult. "Sick of yelling 'REPRESENTATIVE' into the phone 10 times just to talk to a human being? My new bill makes sure you don't have to talk to a clanker if you don't want to," he wrote. Aleksic said the use of the word inherently creates an outgroup. An us vs. them mindset. But the irony, he noted, is that in attaching the word to non-sentient creations (at least for now) it anthropomorphizes robots akin to an ethnic group or a people group. "And at the same time, it brings them up to the level of humans to even be dehumanized in the first place. So ironically, the people saying clanker, are assigning more of a personality to these robots than actually exists." Many of the memes circulating now zero in on the xenophobia of it all, and what social media users are calling, robot racism or robophobia. Using existing stereotypes and tropes, they joke about a not too distant future where robots are ubiquitous as second-class citizens, facing discrimination in the same ways that Black people and other racial or ethnic groups in America have historically faced. In one video with over 7.7 million views, TikTok user @vibestealer, who is a young Black man, pretends it's 2044 and his daughter has brought home a robot boyfriend. Ominous music plays in the background as he asks about the robot's intentions, while coughing the words "clanker" and "garbage" into his fist. "I don't want you anywhere near my daughter!," he yells at one point. Another popular iteration of the meme features people pretending to apologize to their future robot overlords for past anti-robot transgressions, including use of the "c-word." The spread of clankers comes as AI is fundamentally transforming work and the workplace as we know them. "We have a social need right now to respond to the proliferation of AI, especially when AI is taking human jobs, especially when they're replacing online creators," Aleksic said. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that the majority of Americans are wary about the use of AI in the workplace. Sixty-two percent said they think the use of AI at work will have a major impact on workers over the next 20 years. About a third believe the benefits and harms will be equally split for workers. Meantime, 22% are uncertain about its potential effect. Perhaps no other generation is feeling this more acutely than Gen Z, many of whom are now graduating from college. As NPR reported, economists believe that the 2025 job market is the most challenging in the last decade -- not counting the pandemic period. And that is likely to worsen within a generation. "To be clear on a longer time horizon, and by longer we're talking about 15 to 20 years, not 50 or a hundred years, there will be virtually nothing that a human being can do that a machine can't do as well or better for a tiny fraction of the cost," Adam Dorr, the director of Research for Rethinx, a nonprofit nonpartisan think tank that focuses on understanding disruptive technology, told NPR. "That's simply where the technology of artificial intelligence and robotics and automation is headed." For now, he said, we are living in a grace period, where AI will enhance the work that we do. "They will turbocharge our productivity. They will complement the human workforce." In Dorr's view, which he describes as optimistic, this creates a chance for a world in which humans will be free from toil. The drudgery that is work and making and distributing products will be shifted onto robots and AI leaving people liberated in a way they never have been before. And there is no time to waste in creating a brand new framework for it. "There's definitely an urgency to this entire situation. But it doesn't mean that it's a cause for panic. It's not a crisis, and it's not a catastrophe yet," he said. The question is, will we still be saying clanker in that world?

"Clankers": A robot slur emerges to express disdain for AI's takeover

State of play: The concerns range from major to minor: people are concerned that AI will put them out of a job, but they're also annoyed that it's getting harder to reach a human being at their mobile carrier. * "When u call customer service and a clanker picks up" one X post from July reads, with over 200,000 likes, alongside a photo of someone removing their headset in resignation. * "Genuinely needed urgent bank customer service and a clanker picked up," reads another from July 30. Here's what to know: Where "clanker" comes from Context: The word is onomatopoeic, but the term can be traced back to Star Wars. * It comes from a 2005 Star Wars video game, "Republic Commando," according to Know Your Meme. * The term was also used in 2008's Star Wars: The Clone Wars: "Okay, clankers," one character says. "Eat lasers." Robot-specific insults are a common trope in science fiction. * In the TV Show Battlestar Galactica, characters refer to the robots as "toasters" and "chrome jobs." * "Slang is moving so fast now that a [Large Language Model] trained on everything that happened before... is not going to have immediate access to how people are using a particular word now," Nicole Holliday, associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley, told Rolling Stone. "Humans [on] Urban Dictionary are always going to win." How people feel about AI Anxiety over AI's potential impact on the workforce is especially strong. By the numbers: U.S. adults' concerns over AI have grown since 2021, according to Pew Research Center, and 51% of them say that they're more concerned than excited about the technology. * Only 23% of adults said that AI will have a very or somewhat positive impact on how people do their jobs over the next 20 years. And those anxieties aren't unfounded. * AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs -- and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios in May. * And the next job market downturn -- whether it's already underway or still years off -- might be a bloodbath for millions of workers whose jobs can be supplanted by AI, Axios' Neil Irwin wrote on Wednesday. People may have pressing concerns about their jobs or mental health, but their annoyances with AI also extend to the mundane, like customer service, Google searches, or dating apps. * Social media users have described dating app interactions where they suspect the other party is using AI to write responses. * There are a number of apps solely dedicated, in fact, to creating images and prompts for dating apps. Yes, but: Hundreds of millions of people across the world are using ChatGPT every day, its parent company reports. What we're watching: Sens. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and Jim Justice (R-WV) introduced a bipartisan bill last month to ensure that people can speak to a human being when contacting U.S. call centers. "Slur" might not be the right word for what's happening People on the internet who want a word to channel their AI frustrations are clear about the s-word. The inclination to "slur" has clear, cathartic appeal, lexical semantician Geoffrey Nunberg wrote in his 2018 article "The Social Life of Slurs." But any jab at AI is probably better classified as "derogatory."

Is an AI backlash brewing? What 'clanker' says about growing frustrations with emerging tech

"Clanker," a word that traces back to a Star Wars video game, has emerged in recent weeks as the internet's favorite epithet for any kind of technology looking to replace humans. On TikTok, people harass robots in stores and on sidewalks with it. Search interest for the term has spiked. On X, Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., used the term last week to tout a new piece of legislation. "Sick of yelling "REPRESENTATIVE" into the phone 10 times just to talk to a human being?," he posted on X. "My new bill makes sure you don't have to talk to a clanker if you don't want to." In one video, which has more than 6 million views on TikTok, a small, four-wheeled delivery robot gets berated with the word. "It makes me sick just seeing a..." Nic, a 19-year-old student and aspiring content creator in Miami Beach who posted the video, says as it approached, adding: "Clanker!" A slur is generally defined as a word or phrase meant to denigrate a person based on their membership to a particular group such as a race, gender or religion -- one that goes beyond rudeness into overt bigotry. They are almost always directed at people. "Clanker" appears to have peeked into the internet's lexicon starting in early June, with Google Trends data showing a sudden uptick in search interest. An entry on KnowYourMeme.com, a website dedicated to documenting the varied weirdness of the internet, traced the term back to the 2010s, when Star Wars communities adopted it from its use in various Star Wars shows to refer to battle robots. Other pieces of science fiction also predicted the rise of slurs for machines, most notably "Blade Runner," with "skinjob" to refer to highly advanced, humanlike robots. But there's a catch. By using a slur in a way that would typically apply to a human, people are also elevating the technology, offering some sense that people both want to put down the machines and recognize their ascension in society. Adam Aleksic, a linguist who is also a content creator focused on how the internet is shaping language, said he first noticed the emergence of "clanker" a couple of weeks ago. Its use mirrored classic slurs related to racial tropes and appeared to emerge out of a growing "cultural need" related to growing unease with where advanced technology is heading. In one video -- somewhat ironically appearing to have been created by AI -- a man berates his daughter during a family dinner for dating "a goddamned clanker," before his wife steps in and apologizes to the robot. "What we're doing is we're anthropomorphizing and personifying and simplifying the concept of an AI, reducing it into an analogy of a human and kind of playing into the same tropes," Aleksic said. "Naturally, when we trend in that direction, it does play into those tropes of how people have treated marginalized communities before." The use of "clanker" is rising as people are more often encountering AI and robots in their daily lives, something that is only expected to continue in the coming years. The steady expansion of Waymo's driverless cars across U.S. cities has also come with some human-inflicted bumps and bruises for the vehicles along the way. Food delivery bots are an increasingly common sight on sidewalks. In the virtual world, cybersecurity firms continue to warn about the proliferation of bots on the web that comprise a growing share of all web traffic -- including as many as one in five social media accounts. The anti-machine backlash has long been simmering but is now seemingly breaking to the surface. A global report by Gartner research group found that 64% of customers would prefer that companies didn't use AI for customer service -- with another 53% stating they would consider switching to a competitor if they found out a company was doing so. People are becoming more worried about AI taking their jobs, even though evidence of actual AI-related job losses is relatively scant. "Clanker" is also not the first pejorative term for something related to AI to have spread across the internet. "Slop" as a catchall term for AI-generated content that is of low quality or obviously created by AI -- such as "shrimp Jesus" -- entered internet parlance last year and has since become widely used. Other anti-AI terms that have emerged include "tin skin" and "toaster," a term that traces back to the science fiction show Battlestar Galactica. And there's even some pushback -- joking and serious -- about whether such slurs should be used. In a Reddit community for Black women, a post about "clanker" offered some sense of the tension: "And I know it's probably a joke in all from social media, but I can't help but feel like it's incredibly tasteless." Others have noted that some of the enthusiastic embrace of "clanker" feels more about being able to throw around a slur rather than any deeper issue with technology. Nic, whose TikTok video helped spark the "clanker" phenomenon, said he sees both why people have taken to the phrase as well as why some find it problematic. Nic, who asked to withhold his last name out of privacy concerns, said he did sense some people were using the word as a stand-in for a racial epithet. Still, Nic, who is Black, said he saw the term more broadly as a lighthearted way to express a growing anxiety with where technology is headed, particularly as it pertains to the future of employment. "I see it as being a push back against AI," he said. "A lot of lives are being changed because of robots ... and me personally I see it as a stupid way of fighting, but there's a little truth to it, as well."

How 'Clanker' Became the Internet's New Favorite Slur

This Author Wants Better Deals for Audiobook Narrators. She's Using Smutty Romance To Get It Clanker. Wireback. Coguscker. People are feeling the inescapable inevitability of AI developments, the encroaching of the digital into everything from entertainment to work. And their answer? Slurs. AI is everywhere -- on Google summarizing search results and siphoning web traffic from digital publishers, on social media platforms like Instagram, X, and Facebook, adding misleading context to viral posts, or even powering Nazi chatbots. Generative AI and Large Language Models -- AI trained on huge datasets -- are being used as therapists, consulted for medical advice, fueling spiritual psychosis, directing self-driving cars, and churning out everything from college essays to cover letters to breakup messages. Alongside this deluge is a growing sense of discontent from people fearful of artificial intelligence stealing their jobs, and worried what effect it may have on future generations -- losing important skills like media literacy, problem solving, and cognitive function. This is the world where the popularity of AI and robot slurs has skyrocketed, being thrown at everything from ChatGPT servers to delivery drones to automated customer service representatives. Rolling Stone spoke with two language experts who say the rise in robot and AI slurs does come from a kind of cultural pushback against AI development, but what's most interesting about the trend is that it uses one of the only tools AI can't create: slang "Slang is moving so fast now that an LLM trained on everything that happened before it is not going to have immediate access to how people are using a particular word now," says Nicole Holliday, associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley. "Humans [on] Urban Dictionary are always going to win." Clanker, the most popular of the current AI slurs, was first used in the 2005 Star Wars first-person shooter video game Republic Commando, according to Know Your Meme. But it was introduced to most audiences in a 2008 episode of the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars as a retort from a Jedi fighting a horde of battle droids. "Okay clankers," the Jedi said. "Eat lasers." According to Adam Aleksic, the creator of the TikTok page Etymology Nerd and author of the 2025 book Algospeak, the meme first gained popularity on the r/Prequelmemes subreddit, a Star Wars fan community. Star Wars isn't the only science fiction offering that had its characters say derogatory things to their robot counterparts. In Battlestar Galactica, people referred to the sentient robots, Cylons, as "toasters" or "chrome jobs." Both Aleksic and Holliday note that the way slurs work -- in these stories and in real life -- is by carrying an assumed power structure along with them. "Slurs are othering. Usually, the things that we end up considering to be slurs or epithets are from a majority group with power against a minority group," says Holliday. "So when people use these terms, they're in some ways doing so as a self-protective measure, and we tolerate that more because humans are [perceived as] the minority group. And punching up is always more socially acceptable than punching down." But there's also a problem with using slurs as a way to fight back against AI encroachment, these experts say, as the words can actually reinforce the belief that AI is becoming more human. "It's drawing on historical ways that slurs have dehumanized others," Aleksic tells Rolling Stone. "Something requires a degree of anthropomorphization, of personification, for a slur to work." The easiest place to see the humanization and dehumanization of slurs is in POV videos that imagine situations where robot slurs like clanker, wireback, and tin-skinned aren't used to cheekily fight back against chatbots, but against AI individuals that have some kind of place in a fictional future society -- a Guess Who's Coming to Dinner for the robot age. Many creators post skits where the robot slurs are spoken while a robot is applying for a job, or meeting their human partner's parents for a holiday. As robot slurs continue to have their viral moment, there's been a rise in concerned internet users who feel like the trend is just a convoluted way for people to get close to saying real-life slurs. They're not wrong -- its how they got started on the Star Wars subreddit. "The way clanker was used was a clear analogy to the N-word," Aleksic says. "There'd be a photo of a droid giving you the C-word pass or one captioned 'What's up my Clanka?' with an 'a.'" Aleksic thinks many of the robot slurs are popular because they inspire such mixed reactions. Algorithms reward strong feelings, and clanker content has the added benefit of grabbing people who don't like AI, people who want to be edgy online, and people who are afraid of being the "woke" friend all at the same time. Unfortunately, even if the robot slur trend died tomorrow, whatever took its place would most likely be equally rooted in shocking and controversial language. While it's hard to tell how much longevity these slurs will have, or how much of the trend's popularity comes from anti-AI sentiment or the algorithmic appeal of buzzwords, the linguists who spoke to Rolling Stone say this fits into the natural way human language evolves. People adapt words because of how using them makes them feel -- and words change based on the context of other words being used around them. "In the case of clanker, it's seen as funny or cool to be counter-cultural to AI. African American English spread into the mainstream because it was perceived as cool from the outside. It was sociologically prestigious," Aleksic says. "But if you look at how algorithms change these words, it's kind of an exaggerated picture of what humans are doing with this medium." Though AI platforms have begun to recognize clanker as a slur, Holliday noted that both ChatGPT and Google AI did not recognize "wireback," instead saying the word wasn't recognized or possibly misspelled. For Holliday, this is one of the fundamental reasons why she believes changes in language and slang will remain the place where AI is always a step behind. "Large language models, AI, it's a flattening of meaning. Because we as humans co-create the meaning of a particular utterance in a context," she says. "So AI has got a lot of context that it's trained on, but it can't tell you what this person meant in that conversation, because it doesn't have the information that you have about previous interactions with that person, about the way that the word has changed in the last two weeks. That's where humans will always have the edge."