Word of the week: Clanker

Is it OK to use the C-word for AI?

In the beginning¹, which is to say the early 2000s, a clanker was a derogatory, “robophobic” term for a droid or a robot — specifically, a robot in the video game Star Wars: Republic Commando or the animated TV series Star Wars: The Clone Wars.² A robot was made of metal; metal clanked. Ergo: clanker. “OK, clankers,” a Jedi barks in a 2008 episode of Clone Wars. “Eat lasers.”

Then the word escaped the Star Wars universe to become an epithet for real-world mechanisms such as delivery robots.

Third-generation Kiwibots, introduced in 2023, pose for their portrait on the UC Berkeley campus. I’ve seen these little clankers scurrying along Berkeley sidewalks with their cargos of consumables. (Wikipedia)

And now clanker has morphed into something more amorphous and possibly more sinister: It can refer not only to a metal-and-rivets creation but to an invisible AI “agent,” especially a maladroit one.

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“AI is everywhere,” wrote CT Jones in an August 6 article for Rolling Stone (archive version):

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.

Other robo-slurs mentioned in the article: cogsucker (derived from cocksucker, sometimes employed as a slur for “homosexual man”) and wireback (derived from wetback, a slur for “immigrant Mexican laborer” suggested by “swimming across the Rio Grande” into the U.S.).

“Usually, the things that we end up considering to be slurs or epithets are from a majority group with power against a minority group,” linguist Nicole Holliday told Rolling Stone. “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.”

On Instagram, linguist

Adam Aleksic

, aka Etymology Nerd, pointed out the clanker is more “intuitive and flexible” than other robot pejoratives like toaster, from Battlestar Galactica. It’s also older: Jesse Sheidlower’s Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction provides a citation from a 1958 article by William Tenn in Popular Mechanics: “Fritz Lang’s 1926 film Metropolis featured a female robot who was the first of a distinguished cinematic line—a line which eventually included such brainy clankers as the robot from another planet in The Day the Earth Stood Still and the swivel-headed Robby in MGM’s Forbidden Planet.”

It isn’t just onomatopoeia that has boosted clanker, whose root word, clank, dates back to the 1600s. Aleksic notes that it has “spread through analogy to the n-word.” See, for example, the Clankers section of the /r/prequelmemes subreddit, where discourse about “hard R” (clanker) versus “R-less” (clanka) sometimes gets heated.

“This sub needs to cool it with the hard r”

Taboo-avoidance is on full display with the jocularly minced “C-word.”

“Did you just say the C-word?” Via Know Your Meme

Want more evidence of clanker’s spread? In late July, U.S. Senator Ruben Gallego, Democrat of Arizona, tweeted that his new bill “makes sure you don’t have to talk to a clanker if you don’t want to.”

“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,”

There’s something paradoxical about clanker’s use as a slur, says Adam Aleksic. In a TikTok video posted on August 9, he points out that “the idea of a slur requires a high degree of anthropomorphization in order to work. … You first have to elevate the robot” — or the AI — “to near-personhood so you can put it down.” Sure, it’s a joke, he says. But here’s the unfunny kicker: “The more we mentally legitimize artificial intelligence as human, even subconsciously, the easier it is to believe in misinformation.”

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You may need a palate cleanser after that. I offer two:

Anthony Moser, “I Am a AI Hater”:

[T]he makers of AI aren’t damned by their failures, they’re damned by their goals. They want to build a genie to grant them wishes, and their wish is that nobody ever has to make art again. They want to create a new kind of mind, so they can force it into mindless servitude. Their dream is to invent new forms of life to enslave.

Linguist Christopher Johnson talks with

Human Intelligence™

, a “community that supports human creativity”:

It’s not clear that the [AI] technology is meeting some sort of need that’s been expressed by consumers. The technology is meeting a need of employers to not have to pay people to do the kind of knowledge work that experts used to do in technology companies. So the customer is the employer that’s going to benefit from it more than the person who’s using it.

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More from me on AI:

Slop (November 2024)
Promptography (April 2023)
Hallucination (February 2023)

1. Update: After I published this post, Jesse Sheidlower emailed to point out that clanker “may have been popularized by Star Wars, but it wasn’t coined there, and it's been frustrating to see everyone writing about it quoting TikTok influencers for this claim.” Indeed, I provide a 1958 citation further down in my post. Sorry to mislead; consider me chastised.

2. I have never watched the show or played any first-person-shooter game, so I’m counting on my secondhand reporting to be accurate and free of AI fictions.