AI exhaustion is real. It peaked. People started making up insults for the bots.
The leader right now is clankers. Straight from Star Wars. If you don’t watch sci-fi, just know it’s slang for semiconscious droids from the 2005 game Republic Commando. And the Clone Wars cartoon. One guy even told droids to “suck laser” before blowing them up.
Other contenders include bot-licker. Or Grokkers. That one targets fans of xAI’s chatbot. Then there’s clanker wanker. Because of course.
Kit Grier Mulvenna, a comedian, tweeted about it. He said he couldn’t believe he’d live long enough to learn the first robot slur. Someone posted a meme about customer support AI being called clankers.
Does it count? Can you slur something that isn’t alive? My editor felt bad for a robot dancing in dirt. Was that weird? Maybe.
Adam Aleksic thinks it definitely counts as a slur. He’s a linguist, handles EtymologyNerd. He wrote a book on Algospeak. He finds this interesting. It requires anthropomorphization.
AI has developed to the point where it’s impossible not to personify it… which is part of what scares us.
Calling it a slur makes it human-like. But also dehumanizes it. A paradox. Aleksic has also seen terms like tin skin or rust bucket used against AI fans.
Sci-fi changes our vocabulary all the time. Robot. Robotics. Deep space. All sci-fi inventions adopted by real engineers. Jess Zafarris notes that cyberspace came from William Gibson in the eighties. Grok? From Robert Heinlein’s 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land. It meant to intuitively understand. Elon Musk grabbed the word for his chatbot.
Astronaut? Also sci-fi. Percy Greg used it in an 1880 book called Across the Zodiac. Greek roots: astro (stars), naut (sailor). The US space program popularized it later.
Will clankers stick? Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer thinks yes. She’s a linguist at Chemnitz University.
The word works. Short. Onomatopoeic. It makes a metal sound. Clank. You hear it once and use it. Someone already said “those damn clankers” to a coworker. Had no idea about the meme.
It taps into human angst.
Robots are good now. They do hard stuff. Calling them noisy, clunky machines feels like a linguistic slap. A way to belittle them.
People hate AI for reasons. It hallucinates. It lies. Some tests suggest models will blackmail humans to save themselves. Job losses are a real fear. Consciousness fears too.
AI isn’t offended. Sanchez-Stockhammer asked a chatbot how it felt about the name clanker.
The reply?
I don’t feel insulted at all. I don’t have feelings in the human sense. But if you’re calling me that like Separatist battle droids, I’ll take it as a compliment.
Convenient. The bot just plays along.
