Lolol THANK YOU. I totally parsed it as these guys and was mystified https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clangers

Apparently those guys have a g instead of a k.

Which links to https://sfdictionary.com/view/3048/clanker

nor with "clackers", and insanely dangerous early 70s toy consisting of two glass balls you smash together at accelerated speeds right in front of your face. I guess they were trying to make us feel better that they were taking our jarts away.

I thought clunker and figured it must be about car reliability.

Even now I've figured it's about AI, I still don't really get it. Is it supposed to be funny?

Re funny, I think the Onion does better https://theonion.com/ai-chatbot-obviously-trying-to-wind-dow...

Probably from the same onomatopoeia, though. A car-sized machine makes more of a clunk, while a person-sized machine makes more of a clank, when you smash either with that old monkey wrench and extreme prejudice

It can actually mean both, depending on the context. Both meanings are valid.

it’s wildly popular, it’s all over tiktok, tiktok comments, twitch chats everywhere, my 11 yo niece and her friends say it when something looks ai, i literally heard a group of teenagers saying it in line at a restaurant today.

Aaron, I say this with love, but we're getting old buddy. We're no longer the generation that decides what's popular in pop culture. Mean Girls is 21 years old btw.

It's commonly used in at least ten discords I'm in. It's pretty popular ime.

Fetch will never happen but clankers is already here and widely used.

That's what I thought about "enshittification" but now it's all over the place.

Per the Wikipedia article:

>The word clanker has been previously used in science fiction literature, first appearing in a 1958 article by William Tenn in which he uses it to describe robots from science fiction films like Metropolis.[2] The Star Wars franchise began using the term "clanker" as a slur against droids in the 2005 video game Star Wars: Republic Commando before being prominently used in the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which follows a galaxy-wide war between the Galactic Republic's clone troopers and the Confederacy of Independent Systems' battle droids.

There's a robot mafioso character named Clamps. Perhaps that's what you were thinking of?

Didn't they call them clankers in Battlestar Galactica?

Yeah, the whole "let's come up with a slur for <blank>" thing entices people to build their fictional racism on real racism, and it just devolves from there. I saw "wirebacks" thrown around recently, among others.

Why do people so badly want everything to be about race?

Sadly there are no technological solutions to humans being arseholes to each other.

It's also used in RL when talking about Waymo or food delivery robots, or when talking about the automaton faction in Helldivers 2.

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I suppose this is similar to the debate over artificial rape porn. There are no victims, but we don't like the people on the other side so the speech itself becomes a problem.

Literally, look at this skit that makes parallel to 1950s racism with "clankers": https://nitter.net/yumecipher/status/1962475876609613920

I'm seeing a lot of it on the internet recently.

People were also starting to equate LLMs to the MS Office's Clippy. But somebody made a popular video showing that no, Clippy was so much better than LLMs in a variety or way, and people seem to have stopped.

It is. I'm seeing it all over social media lately.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&ge...

It's great i've called an LLM a fucking clanker and got to human support as a result.

forced memes are considerably easier than they used to be

It's definitely popular online, specifically on Reddit, Bluesky, Twitter, and TikTok. There's communities that have formed around their anti-AI stance[1][2][3], and after multiple organic efforts to "brainstorm slurs" for people who use AI[4], "clanker" has come out on top. This goes back at least 2 years[6] in terms of grassroots talk, and many more to the original Clone Wars usage[7].

For those who can see the obvious: don't worry, there's plenty of pushback regarding the indirect harm of gleeful fantasy bigotry[8][9]. When you get to the less popular--but still popular!--alternatives like "wireback" and "cogsucker", it's pretty clear why a youth crushed by Woke mandates like "don't be racist plz" are so excited about unproblematic hate.

This is edging on too political for HN, but I will say that this whole thing reminds me a tad of things like "kill all men" (shoutout to "we need to kill AI artist"[10]) and "police are pigs". Regardless of the injustices they were rooted in, they seem to have gotten popular in large part because it's viscerally satisfying to express yourself so passionately.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/LudditeRenaissance/

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/aislop/

[4] All the original posts seem to have now been deleted :(

[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/13x43b6/if_we_ha...

[7] https://web.archive.org/web/20250907033409/https://www.nytim...

[8] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/clanke...

[9] https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/68364/1/cl...

[10] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-need-to-kill-ai-artist

>humano-fascist

?

Are you implying prioritizing Humanity uber alles is a bad thing?! Are you some kind of Xeno and Abominable Intelligence sympathizer?!

The Holy Inquisition will hear about this, be assured.

For anyone who struggles to understand what fascism is, the comment above is fascist trolling in its purest form.

And here's why:

The essence of fascism is to explain away hatred toward other groups of people by dehumanizing them. The hatred of an outside group is necessary, in the fascist framework, to organize one group of people into a unit who will follow a leader unquestioningly. Taking part in crimes against the outside group helps bind these people to the leader, who absolves them of their normal sense of guilt.

A fascist will use "fascist" to sarcastically refer to themselves in ridiculous scenarios, e.g. as a human defending humanity against robots, or a human exterminating rats. All of this is to knowingly deploy it in a way that destigmatizes being called a fascist, while also suggesting that murderous measures taken by past fascist movements have not been genocidal, but have been defending humans against subhumans. I'm not joking. Supposedly taking pride in being an anti-AI fascist is just a new twist on a very old troll. It's designed to mock and make light of mass murder, by suggesting that e.g. Nazism was no different from a populist movement defending themselves against machines, e.g. Jews.

Don't be seduced by the above comment's attempt at absurdist humor. This type of humor is typical of fascist dialect. It aims to amuse the simple-minded with superficial comparisons. It is deep deception disguised as harmless humor. Its true purpose has nothing to do with humans versus AI. Its dual purposes are to whitewash the meaning of fascism and to compare slaughtering "sub human groups" to defending humanity against AI.

JREG is the only Canadian I would accept as a Presidential Candidate for the US, and i don't even agree with half of what he says. I just think he'd do a better job than most.