It is an insult to AI’s age.
“Clanker”, a word that goes back to a Star Wars video game, has emerged in recent weeks as the favorite internet epithet for any type of technology that seeks to replace humans. In Tiktok, people harass robots in stores and sidewalks with him. The search interest of the term has increased. In X, Senator Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., He used the term last week to promote a new legislation.
“Sick of shouting” representative “to the phone 10 times just to talk to a human being?”, He published in X. “My new bill ensures that I don’t have to talk to a clan if you don’t want.”
In a video, which has more than 6 million visits about Tiktok, a small four -wheel delivery robot is rebuked with the word.
“He gets sick just to see a …” Nic, a 19 -year -old student and aspiring content creator in Miami Beach who published the video, he says when he approached, and added: “Clanker!”
An insult is generally defined as a word or phrase destined to denigrate a person based on their membership to a particular group such as a race, gender or religion, one that goes beyond rudeness in intolerance. They are almost always aimed at people.
“Clanker” seems to have been seen in the Internet lexicon in early June, with Google Trends data that show a sudden increase in search interest. An entry in Knowyourmeme.com, a website dedicated to documenting the varied rarity of the Internet, tracked the term until 2010, when Star Wars communities adopted it of their use in several Star Wars programs to refer to battle robots. Other science fiction pieces also predicted the increase in insults for machines, especially the “blade corridor”, with “Skinjob” to refer to highly advanced and human robots.
But there is a trap. By using an insult in a way that would normally apply to a human, people are also raising technology, offering some feeling that people want to leave machines and recognize their ascension in society.
Adam Aleksic, a linguist who is also a content creator focused on how Internet is shaping language, said he first noticed the appearance of “clanker” a couple of weeks ago. Its use reflected classic insults related to racial tropos and seemed to arise from a growing “cultural need” related to growing concern with the course of advanced technology. In a video, something ironically that seems to have been created by AI, a man rebukes his daughter during a family dinner for going out with “a damn clanker”, before his wife intervenes and apologizes to the robot.
“What we are doing is anthropomorphize and personify and simplify the concept of an AI, reducing it to an analogy of a human and playing the same tropes,” Aleksic said. “Naturally, when we tend in that direction, he plays in those tropes of how people have treated the marginalized communities before.”
The use of “clanker” is increasing as people find themselves more frequently in AI and robots in their daily lives, something that is only expected to continue in the coming years. The constant expansion of Waymo driverless cars in US cities has also come with some bumps and bruises inflicted by humans for vehicles along the way. Food delivery bots are an increasingly common view on sidewalks. In the virtual world, cybersecurity companies continue to warn about the proliferation of bots on the web that include a growing part of all web traffic, including up to one in five social media accounts.
The reaction against the machine has been boiling for a long time, but now it is apparently breaking the surface. A global Gartner Research Group report found that 64% of customers would prefer that companies not use AI for customer service, with another 53% indicating that they would consider changing a competitor if they discovered that a company was doing it. People care more about the AI take their work, despite the fact that the evidence of real employment losses related to AI is relatively scarce.
“Clanker” is not the first pejorative term for something related to AI has spread online. “Slop” as a capital term for the content generated by AI which is of low quality or obviously created by AI, such as “Shrimp Jesus”, entered the Internet language last year and since then has been widely used. Other anti-Ai terms that have emerged include “Tin Skin” and “Toaster”, a term that goes back to the science fiction show Battlestar Galactica.
And there is even a setback, joking and serious, about whether such insults must be used. In a Reddit community for black women, a publication about “Clanker” offered a certain sense of tension: “And I know that it is probably a joke on all social networks, but I cannot avoid feeling that it is incredibly tasteless.”
Others have pointed out that part of the enthusiastic hug of “clanker” feels more about being able to launch an insult instead of any deeper problem with technology.
Nic, whose Tiktok video helped provoke the “clanker” phenomenon, said he sees why people have led to the phrase and why some find it problematic.
Nic, who asked to retain his last name for privacy concerns, said he felt that some people were using the word as a substitute for a racial epithet.
Even so, Nic, who is black, said he saw the widest term as a cheerful way to express an increasing anxiety with the place where technology is directed, particularly in regard to the future of employment.
“I see it as a thrust against AI,” he said. “Many lives are being changed due to robots … and personally I see it as a stupid way to fight, but there is also a little truth.”
