[LetsGetTechnicl]

I feel like it started as a joke, but now people are just using it as a stand-in for racial slurs against Black and brown people, and it's honestly sickening. Like TikToks of people making classically racist jokes about Black people but changing it to "clanker" as a workaround.

[Gracana]

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.

[lagniappe]

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

[thrance]

Racial profiling is now legal: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/us/politics/supreme-court...

[MangoToupe]

What do you mean specifically?

[lupusreal]

Fragility.

[DrillShopper]

Nobody wants it to be, but wanting something to not be about racism doesn't make it not about racism.

Jim Crow "ended" (it's what we tell ourselves) in the south in 1965 with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Our last two presidents were adults when that happened, and it's not like racism was solved when those laws were passed.

The US still has a lot of work to do here - it's absurd to me to hear US Conservatives talking about how slavery ended in the 1860s so we should end protections for African Americans because it's been "so long". It hasn't, and they know that.

[const_cast]

... Because most things involve race?

Like, clanker is the equivalent of a racial slur but for robots. The reason it works and is funny is because we already know what racial slurs are and have a contexr for it.

If racial slurs didn't exist, neither would clanker.

You have to actually think about the world we live in and why things are the way they are. Its a easy to say "just cuz lol", but we're engineers. Nothing happens "just cuz". No, there's a reason.

[flykespice]

Perhaps because it's a fictional slur that is cleary a play on the n-word, a real racist slur?

[progbits]

What's the connection between those two words? You know, aside the -er ending like in say teacher.

[flykespice]

[flagged]

[dpassens]

I'd consider equating people and robots rather more degrading to people than calling non-people "slurs".

[wedn3sday]

No reason to be uncivil. It's a bit of a stretch to say that "clanker" is related to race in any way. Lots of slurs have nothing to do with race, you're projecting your own bias and prejudices as some sort of universal linguistic truth. In highschool band the percussionists called the wind section "honkers," were they making some vailed n-word allusion? No, it was silly and the wind section were all blowhards so we made fun of them with a little in-group slur.

[LocalH]

Anyone who says "clanker" is analogous to any actual racial slur is revealing their belief that AI, in its current state, can be deserving of the same rights that humans have. Which is demonstrably false, given the current state of AI.

Now, true AGI? There's a debate to be had there regarding rights etc. But you better be able to prove that a so-called AGI is truly sentient before you push for that. This isn't Data. There is nothing even remotely close to sentience present in any LLM. I don't even know if AGI is going to be achievable within 100 years. But as far as I'm concerned, AI "slurs" are just blowback against the invasion of AI into everyday life, as is increasingly common. There will be a point where the hard discussion of "does true artificial general intelligence deserve rights" will happen. That time is not now, except as a thought experiment.

[LocalH]

It's closer to "cracker" than the n-word

[dcminter]

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

[lazide]

Well, I mean, we did invent Nuclear Weapons…. That’s a type of technical solution!

[dcminter]

You know I nearly added that caveat, but I figured it counted as more being arseholes rather than a solution per se despite the long-term reduction.

[Cthulhu_]

Don't tell Skynet that!

[esseph]

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

[Cthulhu_]

Helldivers is excessively/satirically facist and xenophobic though, I mean uh, managed democracy, rah rah!

[esseph]

It's very fun in that way

[axus]

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.

[devnullbrain]

>We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

- Kurt Vonnegut

and

>If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

>A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

- Roald Dahl

[thrance]

You're an idiot if you truly think that's the issue with "artificial rape". Go inform yourself instead of reflexively defending your in-group.

[flykespice]

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