"Clankers": A robot slur emerges to express disdain for AI's takeover
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AI is everywhere whether you like it or not, and some online have turned to a choice word to express their frustration.
Why it matters: Referring to an AI bot as a "clanker" (or a "wireback," or a "cogsucker") has emerged as a niche, irreverent internet phenomenon that illuminates a broader disdain for the way AI is overtaking technology, labor, and culture.
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."
- "['Slur'] is both more specific and more value-laden than a term like "derogative," Nunberg writes, adding that a derogative word "qualifies as a slur only when it disparages people on the basis of properties such as race, religion, ethnic or geographical origin, gender, sexual orientation or sometimes political ideology."
- "Sailing enthusiasts deprecate the owners of motor craft as 'stinkpotters,' but we probably wouldn't call the word a slur—though the right-wingers' derogation of environmentalists as 'tree-huggers' might qualify, since that antipathy has a partisan cast."
- "For us, a slur is a kind of verbalized thought-crime: it perpetuates social inequities, infects even innocent minds, and undermines the conduct of public discourse."
