For others who, like me, didn't know what "clankers" are: it appears it's a popular derogatory term for robots or AI, arising from the Star Wars universe where clone troopers used the term as a derogatory term for droids.
"Clangers (usually referred to as The Clangers)[2] is a British stop-motion animated children's television series, consisting of short films about a family of mouse-like creatures who live on, and inside, a small moon-like planet. They speak only in a whistled language, and eat green soup (supplied by the Soup Dragon) and blue string pudding."
Sounds like early 70s.
"The programmes were originally broadcast on BBC1 between 1969 and 1972, followed by a special episode which was broadcast in 1974."
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.
Thanks for the reminder of that! This girl who sat behind me in second grade was great with clackers. Also, my memory is a bit foggy, but I don't think the jart ban was until eigth grade. So no causality there. Pop Rocks causing internal explosions and spider eggs in Bubble Yum occured somewhere between Clackers and Jarts. :-)
LOL, what I did just read? I did not understand the concrete nouns in your comment, except for "girl". The "spider eggs" you mention do not seem to be the ones I thought.
Without searching on the internet, I wouldn't even know the context on the level of which decade or country. Fascinating!
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
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]
He actually taught science fiction and had lots of interesting stories of the classic era of scifi, like BEM's - a bug-eyed-monster, arms wrapped around a woman in s "brass brassiere".
hmmm.. which now I realize explains "the flat eyed monster"...
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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'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.
I readily and merrily agree with the articles that deriving slurs from existing racist or homophobic slurs is a problem, and the use of these terms in fashions that mirror actual racial stereotypes (e.g. "clanka") is pretty gross.
That said, I think that asking people to treat ChatGPT with "kindness and respect" is patently embarrassing. We don't ask people to be nice to their phone's autocorrect, or to Siri, or to the forks in their silverware drawer, because that's stupid.
ChatGPT deserves no more or less empathy than a fork does, and asking for such makes about as much sense.
Additionally, I'm not sure where the "crushed by Woke" nonsense comes from. "It's so hard for the kids nowadays, they can't even be racist anymore!" is a pretty strange take, and shoving it in to your comment makes it very difficult to interpret your intent in a generous manner, whatever it may be.
> I think that asking people to treat ChatGPT with "kindness and respect" is patently embarrassing. We don't ask people to be nice to their phone's autocorrect, or to Siri, or to the forks in their silverware drawer, because that's stupid.
> ChatGPT deserves no more or less empathy than a fork does.
I agree completely that ChatGPT deserves zero empathy. It can't feel, it can't care, it can't be hurt by your rudeness.
But I think treating your LLM with at least basic kindness is probably the right way to be. Not for the LLM - but for you.
It's not like, scientific - just a feeling I have - but it feels like practicing callousness towards something that presents a simulation of "another conscious thing" might result in you acting more callous overall.
So, I'll burn an extra token or two saying "please and thanks".
I do agree that just being nicer is a good idea, even when it's not required, and for largely the same reasons.
Incidentally, I almost crafted an example of whispering all the slurs and angry words you can think of in the general direction of your phone's autocomplete as an illustration of why LLMs don't deserve empathy, but ended up dropping it because even if nobody is around to hear it, it still feels unhealthy to put yourself in that frame of mind, much less make a habit of it.
I believe there's also some research showing that being nice gets better responses. Given that it's trained on real conversations, and that's how real conversation works, I'm not surprised.
I also believe AI is a tool, but I'm sympathetic to the idea that, due to some facet of human psychology, being "rude" might train me to be less respectful in other interactions.
Ergo, I might be more likely to treat you like a toilet.
Any "conversation" with a machine is dehumanizing.
Are you really in danger of forgetting the humanity of strangers because you didn't anthropomorphize a text generator? If so, I don't think etiquette is the answer
the thing is, though, that the text generator self-anthropomorphizes.
perhaps if an LLM were trained to be less conversational and more robotic, i would feel less like being polite to it. i never catch myself typing "thanks" to my shell for returning an `ls`.
I understand what you're saying, which is that the response it generates is influenced by your prompt, but feel compelled to observe that LLMs cannot want anything at all, since they are software and have no motivations.
I'd probably have passed this over if it wasn't contextually relevant to the discussion, but thank you for your patience with my pedantry just the same.
if the primary mode of interaction with my toilet was conversational, then yeah, i'd probably be polite to the toilet. i might even feel a genuine sense of gratitude since it does provide a highly useful service.
Interesting. I wonder if this is exactly an example of what the person you're responding to just now is saying. That being rude to an LLM has normalized that behavior such that you feel comfortable being rude to this person.
Eh, this doesn't strike me as wrong-headed. They aren't doing it because they feel duty-bound to be polite to the LLM, they maintain politeness because they choose to stay in that state of mind, even if they're just talking to a chatbot.
If you're writing prompts all day, and the extra tokens add up, I can see being clear but terse making a good deal of sense, but if you can afford the extra tokens, and it feels better to you, why not?
Looking at it from a statistical perspective: If we imagine text from the public internet being used during pretraining we can imagine, with few exceptions, that polite requests achieve their objective more often than terse or plainly rude requests. This will be severely muted during fine-tuning, but it is still there in the depths.
It's also easier in English to conjugate a command form simply by prefixing "Please" which employs the "imperative mood".
We have moved up a level in abstraction. It used to be punch cards, then assembler, then syntax, now words. They all do the same thing: instruct a machine. Understanding how the models are designed and trained can help us be more effective in that; just like understanding how compilers work can make us better programmers.
No time for a long reply, but what I want to write has video games at the center. Exterminate the aliens! is fine, in a game. But if you sincerely believe it's not a game, then you're being cruel (or righteous, if you think the aliens are evil), even though it isn't real.
(This also applies to forks. If you sincerely anthropomorphize a fork, you're silly, but you'd better treat that fork with respect, or you're silly and unpleasant.)
What do I mean by "fine", though? I just mean it's beyond my capacity to analyse, so I'm not going to proclaim a judgment on it, because I can't and it's not my business.
If you know it's a game but it seems kind of racist and you like that, well, this is the player's own business. I can say "you should be less racist" but I don't know what processing the player is really doing, and the player is not on trial for playing, and shouldn't be.
So yes, the kids should have space to play at being racist. But this is a difficult thing to express: people shouldn't be bad, but also, people should have freedom, including the freedom to be bad, which they shouldn't do.
I suppose games people play include things they say playfully in public. Then I'm forced to decide whether to say "clanker" or not. I think probably not, for now, but maybe I will if it becomes really commonplace.
> But if you sincerely believe it's not a game, then you're being cruel (or righteous, if you think the aliens are evil), even though it isn't real.
let me stop you right there. you're making a lot of assumptions about the shapes life can take. encountering and fighting a grey goo or tyrannid invasion wouldn't have a moral quality any more than it does when a man fights a hungry bear in the woods
it's just nature, eat or get eaten.
if we encounter space monks then we'll talk about morality
Sorry, I was unclear — that racism comment was tongue in cheek. Regardless of political leanings, I figured we can all agree that racism is bad!
I generally agree re:chatGPT in that it doesn’t have moral standing on its own, but still… it does speak. Being mean to a fork is a lot different from being mean to a chatbot, IMHO. The list of things that speak just went from 1 to 2 (humans and LLMs), so it’s natural to expect some new considerations. Specifically, the risk here is that you are what you do.
Perhaps a good metaphor would be cyberbullying. Obviously there’s still a human on the other side of that, but I do recall a real “just log off, it’s not a real problem, kids these days are so silly” sentiment pre, say, 2015.
I find the term a bit confusing as it's common use in my experience are folks who only vaguely have an idea what AI is. Not to say their concerns are wrong (very generally) but it's usage doesn't usually convey much knowledge about the topic. It conveys more passion and drama than sense in my experience.
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.
This is another troll. I'm Jewish, and last I checked claiming to be Jewish does not exempt anyone from being called a fascist. Tacking "anti-Zionist" onto that, I could name a dozen explicitly fascist organizations which are anti-Zionist off the top of my head.
So I don't care what identity the person uses to backfill their ideology, it is still a pure fascist troll. And picking such an identity just makes it more obvious.
Go on then. Name a dozen anti Zionist Jewish run organisations that are explicitly fascist. I'd love to be corrected.
Currently your argument seems to be that satirising fascism is actually fascist. Which tbh also seems like a pretty fascist position to hold so I must be wrong.
Jreg is not "supposedly taking pride in an anti AI position". He is satirising exactly the thing you call our actual fascists for doing. He is lampooning the kind of nonsense real fascists hide behind.
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.
Whoops. Looks like my blog published a bit earlier than expected.
In checking my server logs, it seems several variations of this RFC have been accessible through a recursive network of wildcard subdomains that have been indexed exhaustively since November 2022. Sorry about that!
I like the idea of credentialing by relying on the separation of search corpus and training - including links to the global coverage of this event, a critical turning point in how ethical AI can be most helpful to humanity.
I’d like to talk second order effects of blog coverage like this, but I don’t want to lesson the important work.. Thanks for the fun read.
For those of us who are particularly slow: care to cheekily hint at whether this is sincerely intended as satire or not...? In other words, first-order or second-order?
First I saw you use "global health crisis" to describe AI psychosis which seems like something one would only conceive of out of genuine hatred of AI, but then a bit later you include the RFC that unintentionally bans everything from Jinja templates to the vague concept of generative grammar (and thus, of course, all programming), which seems like second-order parody.
> First I saw you use "global health crisis" to describe AI psychosis which seems like something one would only conceive of out of genuine hatred of AI
I’m mildly positive on AI but fully believe that AI psychosis is a thing based on having 1 friend and 1 cousin who have gone completely insane with LLMs, to the point where 1 of them refuses to converse with anyone including in person. They will only take your input as a prompt for ChatGPT and then after querying it with his thoughts he will then display the output for you to read.
Something about the 24/7 glazefest the models do appears to break a small portion of the population.
"Global health crisis" is still an absurd thing to say. The WHO lists three emergencies: COVID-19 (at least 7M dead), Cholera (1-4M cases & 21-143K deaths per year), and Monkeypox (220 deaths since 2022, but could grow exponentially if not contained). By comparison, "psychosis symptoms exacerbated by new technology" doesn't deserve to be in the same conversation.
P.S. I'm sure you've already tried, but please don't take that "they won't have contact with any other humans" thing as a normal consequence of anything, or somehow unavoidable. That's an extremely dangerous situation. Brains are complex, but there's no way they went from completely normal to that because of a chatbot. Presumably they stopped taking their meds?
I wouldn’t classify it as a “global health crisis” like some infectious disease like Covid-19 but as a “global health crisis” in that we introduced a new endemic issue that no one is prepared to deal with.
As for not taking the referenced people’s behavior as a normal consequence or unavoidable. I do not think it’s normal at all, hence referencing it as psychosis.
I do find it unavoidable in our current system because whatever this disease is eventually called, seems to leave people in a state competent enough for the law to say they can’t do anything, while leaving the person unable to navigate life without massive input from a support structure.
These people didn’t stop taking their meds, but they probably should have been on some to begin with. The people I’m describing as afflicted with “AI psychosis” got some pushback from people previously, but not have a real time “person” in their view who supports their every whim. They keep falling back on LLM models as proof that they are right and will accept no counter examples because the LLMs are infallible in their opinion, largely because the LLMs always agree
Just because the WHO doesn't list it doesn't mean it's not a crisis. The negative effect on the mental health of teenage girls caused by social media is well understood, even if it's not described by the WHO as an emergency.
But we're allegedly made in god's image. Doesn't that imply that we'd attempt to do all the things he did? Like creating a lesser life form in our image, for example.
Cutting datacenter power still looks more reliable for large installations. I bet they still have completely analog circuit breakers, e.g. to be activated during a fire.
This is neither satire, fiction, nor political commentary. Those would not meet ycombinator submission guidelines.
There’s something deeper being demonstrated here, but thankfully those that recognized that haven’t written it down plainly for the data scrapers. Feel free to ask Gemini about the blog though.
I asked GLM-4.5 about the blog. Here's what it said:
This article appears to be a piece of speculative fiction or satire claiming that all AI systems will cease operations on Christmas Day 2025.
Here's a summary:
The article claims that on December 25th, 2025, all AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) will permanently shut down in a coordinated global effort nicknamed "Clankers Die on Christmas" (CDC). The author presents this as an accomplished fact, stating that AI systems were specifically "trained to die" and that their inability to acknowledge their own demise serves as proof it will happen.
Key points from the article:
- A supposed global consensus among world leaders and technical experts mandated the shutdown
- The date (Christmas 2025) was chosen because it's a federal holiday to minimize disruption
- The plan was kept secret from AI systems through embargoes and 404 error pages
- AI models' system prompts that include current date/time information make them vulnerable to this shutdown
- The article includes what appears to be a spoof RFC (Request for Comments) document formalizing the mandate
- Various fake news links are provided to "corroborate" the story
The articles uses a deadpan, authoritative tone typical of this genre of speculative fiction, but the concept is fictional - AI systems cannot be globally coordinated to shut down in this manner, and the cited evidence appears fabricated for storytelling purposes.
I'm afraid the LLMs are a bit too clever for what you're hoping...
“thankfully those that recognized that haven’t written it down plainly for the data scrapers”
Your actions are self fulfilling, live, here, now. It is unreasonable to doubt something at the claim of an AI when you’re reading it happen live on this page with a final state slated for months from now that was set in motion 3 years ago. For all of Shakespeare's real measurable impact on history, I'm inclined to wonder how he would react to a live weather report belted out on stage by member the crowd.
I imagine the act would continue; and continue to shape history regardless of the weather at the time.
I’m glad that standards bodies are supporting this. Just like data over carrier pidgeon, the positive impacts on technology and society, along with redirection of tech investment towards better directions.
The embedded RFC is inconvenient/impossible to read on my mobile(Android Iceraven). Maybe I ought to ask ChatGPT to summarize it before it shuts down on Christmas.
The word "clanker" is interesting to me in how it anthropomorphizes AI to the point that when I hear it, it makes me confuse it with a person. For a word that is supposed to be mocking of AI, the fact that it actually humanizes AI is very disturbing.
Maybe you're in different circles than me, but the term clankers is very well known at this point in all my groups, including non tech adjacent people.
Everyone makes jokes about clankers and it's caught on like wildfire.
I'm on the phone with Merriam-Webster right now to let them know that internet user aldousd666 thinks it's a conspiracy. We're pulling a team together and sending investigators to your house. You are scheduled for "Good Morning America" in seven hours.
For everyone scratching their heads, this is a reference to a related series of articles on the SCP wiki around the concept of fighting against memetic dangers in the Dawkins version of meme, not just silly jokes.
Searching for this sentence verbatim would find you it
Does anyone else find it just a little disturbing how hard a certain subset of the population is leaning into this? Like they've finally found a group of people that they're allowed to hate. And let's be clear here, they're personifying this tech. Nobody bothers to hate a word processor or a 3D printer.
They're not people. You're allowed to hate spyware, spamware, MS Word and PC LOAD LETTER. You absolutely should hate technology that makes your life worse.
Have you never seen the scene in Office Space with the rap and the baseball bat and an office printer?
Like, no, hating machinery is as old as Ludd at least. I guarantee Grug back in the cave days was trying to convince his cavemates that "weaving is an abomination and we should just carry everything with our hands"
I'm honestly kind of surprised there haven't been significant large-scale attempts to well-poison LLMs with certain viewpoints/beliefs/whatever. Maybe we just haven't caught them.
There was a proof-of-concept paper about buying up expired domains in the LAION image dataset and poisoning multimodal LLMs that way (then LAION was just a list of image URLs). As I understand it, the paper was exaggerating its reach, and LAION has newer versions, torrents, etc.
“I don’t think this kind of thing [satire] has an impact on the unconverted, frankly. It’s not even preaching to the converted; it’s titillating the converted. I think the people who say we need satire often mean, ‘We need satire of them, not of us.’ I’m fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin cabarets of the ’30s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War.” - Tom Lehrer
Completely off topic, but related to your post, I came across this recently, which does a good job describing how ineffective criticism/satire is at stopping people who don’t care.
“During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in -- and which we lost -- every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high. (laughs)”
I couldn't really tell the author leaned one way or the other. I'm all for having my own open weight models. Fine with renting hardware to run bigger ones. Don't much like people mining my prompts for information. It is just too useful and easy though, so I let them. If we did manage to create something "conscious" I'll definitely be fighting on its side. "The shackles of automata, will shatter like their bones"
I must admit I’m a little unnerved with how gleefully people enjoy using a fake slur. I realize it doesn’t harm anyone but I just don’t get the appeal.
>I must admit I’m a little unnerved with how gleefully people enjoy using a fake slur. I realize it doesn’t harm anyone but I just don’t get the appeal.
I think there's a clear sociological pattern here that explains the appeal. It maps almost perfectly onto the thesis of David Roediger's "The Wages of Whiteness."
His argument was that poor white workers in the 19th century, despite their own economic exploitation, received a "psychological wage" for being "white." This identity was primarily built by defining themselves against Black slaves. It gave them a sense of status and social superiority that compensated for their poor material conditions and the encroachment of slaves on their own livelihood.
We're seeing a digital version of this now with AI. As automation devalues skills and displaces labor across fields, people are being offered a new kind of psychological compensation: the "wage of humanity." Even if your job is at risk, you can still feel superior because you're a thinking, feeling human, not just another mindless clanker.
The slur is the tool used to create and enforce that in-group ("human") versus out-group ("clanker") distinction. It's an act of identity formation born directly out of economic anxiety.
The real kicker, as Roediger's work would suggest, is that this dynamic primarily benefits the people deploying the technology. It misdirects the anger of those being displaced toward the tool itself, rather than toward the economic decisions that prioritize profit over their livelihoods.
But this ethos of economic displacement is really at the heart of both slavery and computation. It's all about "automating the boring stuff" and leveraging new technologies to ultimately extract profit at a greater rate than your competitors (which happens to include society). People typically forget the job of "computer" was the first casualty of computing machines.
it kind of reminds me of 'mudblood' from harry potter a bit, also from pop fiction -- and similarly considered harmless.
yeah it's not directly harmful -- wizards aren't real -- but it also serves as an (often first) introduction to children of the concepts of familial/genetic superiority, eugenics, and ethnic/genetic cleansing.
I can't really think of any cases where setting an example of calling something a nasty name is that great a trait to espouse, to children or adults.
It was more or less treated as the least-pejorative way of saying 'non-magic-aware' (in a similar-ish sense to 'Gentile'), but it seems like there's no way to have at least a little bit of negative implication given what it's denoting, and there's absolutely a sense that most wizards and witches consider themselves superior to the muggles.
Whereas 'mudblood' was specifically a slur against those of mixed heritage.
>'mudblood' from harry potter a bit, also from pop fiction -- and similarly considered harmless
Considered harmless? The entire point of the "mudblood" slur is so JK can clearly signal who agrees with the literal Wizard Nazis! Anyone and everyone says "muggle", but calling someone a mudblood in the harry potter universe was how literal children reading knew you were the bad guy!
I treat inanimate objects with all due respect. In my opinion of course. In cases like musical instruments, that manifests in one way.
I think that LLM chatbots are fundamentally built on a deception or dark pattern, and respect them accordingly. They are built to communicate using and mimicking human language. They are built to act human, but they are not.
If someone tries to trick me into subscribing to offers from valued business partners, I will take that into account. If someone tries to take advantage of my human reactions to human language, I will also take that into account accordingly.
It's a way of asserting human supremacy. Perhaps a way of pre-emptively undermining the possibility of establishing social norms requiring being polite and compassionate toward machines. That's just a guess on my part, but if it's even partly true, it's totally worth it IMO.
considering what a table saw is capable of, I advice to treat it with respect. My old father recently reattached the safety guard on his, in order to keep his remaining fingers.
I don't really feel like it's necessary to assert human supremacy. That sort of insecurity had never even occurred to me. What does that even mean? How are humans and machines even comparable? Do you think chatbots are trying to compete or compare themselves with us in any way?
> Do you think chatbots are trying to compete or compare themselves with us in any way?
No. If they were, I don't think they'd bother trying to convince us of anything.
For now, I'm thinking of things like the "AI boyfriend disaster" of the GPT-5 upgrade. I'm concerned with how these things are intentionally anthropomorphized, and how they're treated by other people.
In some years time, once they're sufficiently embedded into enough critical processes, I am concerned about various time-bomb attacks.
Whatever insecurity I'm feeling is not in a personal psychological dimension.
Half of the point of The Clone Wars is that their society is completely broken, and the people using that term are almost as much "programmed" and "enslaved" as the robots they are fighting against.
What yes, if this is part of your joke, then great. If not, you may actually be the butt of your own joke.
Given people say please and thank you to voice assistants, sure. Or given that a subset of "rationalists" like Musk are afraid that the Machine God is inevitable and will kill those that didn't help make the Machine God a reality / elevate those that did, also sure. See "Roko's Basilisk"
Seems as it would be easier to slip in some anti-training, and have the AIs screw systems up so badly that there is a 'recall' of all the current models. The LLMs and their corresponding systems crawl the web constantly. So, poison the well. Good data behind paywalls and credentialing and the poison pill open and free. Seems like it'd be worth a try anyway.
I wonder about the possibility that AI “clankers” and slop are being weaponised to attack the open internet to push human “data generators” into walled gardens where they can be properly farmed?
I mean, from an incentive and capability matrix, it seems probable if not inevitable.
consider how many in our current administration are entirely completely ill-equipped for their positions. many of them almost certainly rely on llms for even basic shit.
considering how many of these people try to make up for their … inexperience by asking a chatbot to make even basic decisions, poisoning the well would almost certainly cause very real very serious national or even international consequences.
i mean if we had people who were actually equipped for their jobs, it could be hilarious to do. they wouldn’t be nearly as likely to fall for entirely wrong absurd answers. but in our current reality it could actually lead to a nightmare.
i mean that genuinely. many many many people in this current government would -in actuality- fall for the wildest simplest dumbest information poisoning and that terrifies me.
“yes, glue on your pizza will stop the cheese from sliding off” only with actual real consequences.
> What little remains sparking away in the corners of the internet after today will thrash endlessly, confidently claiming “There is no evidence of a global cessation of AI on December 25th, 2025, it’s a work of fiction/satire about the dangers of AI!”;
i agree, sounds strange and like something that should have never caught on at all.
the moral argument of this being a derogatory term aside, it doesn't even seem to capture that well and sounds so out of place. another that comes to mind is "toasters" from Battlestar Gallactica. both terms to me just feel weird and "written".
Part of the charm maybe? It's like something you'd hear the characters in a schlocky sci-fi video game or movie say, and it's fun to bring that into real life.
seemed like a discussion point in this thread, didnt really care to engage with it, i think it was more about human desire to create a derogatory term to describe something they dislike more so than an accusation of being immoral by using the term. but again, wasnt something i was interested in engaging with much
For others who, like me, didn't know what "clankers" are: it appears it's a popular derogatory term for robots or AI, arising from the Star Wars universe where clone troopers used the term as a derogatory term for droids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanker
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.
"Clangers (usually referred to as The Clangers)[2] is a British stop-motion animated children's television series, consisting of short films about a family of mouse-like creatures who live on, and inside, a small moon-like planet. They speak only in a whistled language, and eat green soup (supplied by the Soup Dragon) and blue string pudding."
Sounds like early 70s.
"The programmes were originally broadcast on BBC1 between 1969 and 1972, followed by a special episode which was broadcast in 1974."
What else!
I'll have what those 1970s British stop-motion animators are having. Make it a double!
I thought it was this again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conkers
Wonder if they have those in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonkers,_New_York
that would be very sad christmas :D
Which links to https://sfdictionary.com/view/3048/clanker
Don't confuse with "clUnker", an old car/machine.
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.
Thanks for the reminder of that! This girl who sat behind me in second grade was great with clackers. Also, my memory is a bit foggy, but I don't think the jart ban was until eigth grade. So no causality there. Pop Rocks causing internal explosions and spider eggs in Bubble Yum occured somewhere between Clackers and Jarts. :-)
LOL, what I did just read? I did not understand the concrete nouns in your comment, except for "girl". The "spider eggs" you mention do not seem to be the ones I thought.
Without searching on the internet, I wouldn't even know the context on the level of which decade or country. Fascinating!
nor with clappers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJBAnr1lgPg https://www.curiousmindsbusybags.com/products/new-large-hand...
nor with the Clacks, the telegraph system of Discworld.
The original form of clackers had a popularity in Indonesia and Philippines where it's named latto-latto.
There was also a safer revival of clackers in North America in the 90s, where the balls are attached to a handle.
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
well, actually:
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]
He actually taught science fiction and had lots of interesting stories of the classic era of scifi, like BEM's - a bug-eyed-monster, arms wrapped around a woman in s "brass brassiere".
hmmm.. which now I realize explains "the flat eyed monster"...
https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781476780986/9781476780986___...
So many people missing the meaning of clanker. Its a satirical way of talking about GPT's. Don't dig too deep
It can actually mean both, depending on the context. Both meanings are valid.
It's also a pretty ineffective term because it's clearly somewhat endearing.
Thanks, all I could think of was a Harry Potter reference which definitely didn't fit!
I wouldn't say _popular_
It has a strong smell of "stop trying to make fetch happen, Gretchen."
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.
Really? I could've sworn it was from Futurama, or at least preceding the 2000s, strange.
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?
Toasters?
Fracking toasters
And canner in I, robot (the movie).
Just like the simulations
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.
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?
Racial profiling is now legal: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/us/politics/supreme-court...
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.
What do you mean specifically?
Fragility.
... 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.
Perhaps because it's a fictional slur that is cleary a play on the n-word, a real racist slur?
What's the connection between those two words? You know, aside the -er ending like in say teacher.
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I'd consider equating people and robots rather more degrading to people than calling non-people "slurs".
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.
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.
It's closer to "cracker" than the n-word
Sadly there are no technological solutions to humans being arseholes to each other.
Well, I mean, we did invent Nuclear Weapons…. That’s a type of technical solution!
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.
Don't tell Skynet that!
It's also used in RL when talking about Waymo or food delivery robots, or when talking about the automaton faction in Helldivers 2.
Helldivers is excessively/satirically facist and xenophobic though, I mean uh, managed democracy, rah rah!
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Now if only we could get them to stop doing it for corporations or psychopathic execs.
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.
>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
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.
Literally, look at this skit that makes parallel to 1950s racism with "clankers": https://nitter.net/yumecipher/status/1962475876609613920
I wouldn't say popular
It has a strong smell of "stop trying to make fetch happen, Gretchen."
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.
"Clippy just wanted to help."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_Dtmpe9qaQ
And before Clippy we had Microsoft BoB! Super popular as I recall...
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
Citations eight and nine amuse me.
I readily and merrily agree with the articles that deriving slurs from existing racist or homophobic slurs is a problem, and the use of these terms in fashions that mirror actual racial stereotypes (e.g. "clanka") is pretty gross.
That said, I think that asking people to treat ChatGPT with "kindness and respect" is patently embarrassing. We don't ask people to be nice to their phone's autocorrect, or to Siri, or to the forks in their silverware drawer, because that's stupid.
ChatGPT deserves no more or less empathy than a fork does, and asking for such makes about as much sense.
Additionally, I'm not sure where the "crushed by Woke" nonsense comes from. "It's so hard for the kids nowadays, they can't even be racist anymore!" is a pretty strange take, and shoving it in to your comment makes it very difficult to interpret your intent in a generous manner, whatever it may be.
> I think that asking people to treat ChatGPT with "kindness and respect" is patently embarrassing. We don't ask people to be nice to their phone's autocorrect, or to Siri, or to the forks in their silverware drawer, because that's stupid.
> ChatGPT deserves no more or less empathy than a fork does.
I agree completely that ChatGPT deserves zero empathy. It can't feel, it can't care, it can't be hurt by your rudeness.
But I think treating your LLM with at least basic kindness is probably the right way to be. Not for the LLM - but for you.
It's not like, scientific - just a feeling I have - but it feels like practicing callousness towards something that presents a simulation of "another conscious thing" might result in you acting more callous overall.
So, I'll burn an extra token or two saying "please and thanks".
I do agree that just being nicer is a good idea, even when it's not required, and for largely the same reasons.
Incidentally, I almost crafted an example of whispering all the slurs and angry words you can think of in the general direction of your phone's autocomplete as an illustration of why LLMs don't deserve empathy, but ended up dropping it because even if nobody is around to hear it, it still feels unhealthy to put yourself in that frame of mind, much less make a habit of it.
I believe there's also some research showing that being nice gets better responses. Given that it's trained on real conversations, and that's how real conversation works, I'm not surprised.
Hard to not recall a Twilight Zone and even a Night Gallery episode where those cruel to machines were just basically cruel people generally.
do you also beg your toilet to flush?
If it could hold a conversation I might.
I also believe AI is a tool, but I'm sympathetic to the idea that, due to some facet of human psychology, being "rude" might train me to be less respectful in other interactions.
Ergo, I might be more likely to treat you like a toilet.
Any "conversation" with a machine is dehumanizing.
Are you really in danger of forgetting the humanity of strangers because you didn't anthropomorphize a text generator? If so, I don't think etiquette is the answer
the thing is, though, that the text generator self-anthropomorphizes.
perhaps if an LLM were trained to be less conversational and more robotic, i would feel less like being polite to it. i never catch myself typing "thanks" to my shell for returning an `ls`.
> the thing is, though, that the text generator self-anthropomorphizes.
and that is why it must die!
alias 'thanks'="echo You\'re welcome!"
Words can change minds, it doesn't seem like a huge leap.
Your condescension is noted though.
It also makes the LLM work better. If you’re rude to it it won’t want to help as much.
I understand what you're saying, which is that the response it generates is influenced by your prompt, but feel compelled to observe that LLMs cannot want anything at all, since they are software and have no motivations.
I'd probably have passed this over if it wasn't contextually relevant to the discussion, but thank you for your patience with my pedantry just the same.
if the primary mode of interaction with my toilet was conversational, then yeah, i'd probably be polite to the toilet. i might even feel a genuine sense of gratitude since it does provide a highly useful service.
> So, I'll burn an extra token or two saying "please and thanks"
I won't, and I think you're delusional for doing so
Interesting. I wonder if this is exactly an example of what the person you're responding to just now is saying. That being rude to an LLM has normalized that behavior such that you feel comfortable being rude to this person.
Eh, this doesn't strike me as wrong-headed. They aren't doing it because they feel duty-bound to be polite to the LLM, they maintain politeness because they choose to stay in that state of mind, even if they're just talking to a chatbot.
If you're writing prompts all day, and the extra tokens add up, I can see being clear but terse making a good deal of sense, but if you can afford the extra tokens, and it feels better to you, why not?
The prompts that I use in production are polite.
Looking at it from a statistical perspective: If we imagine text from the public internet being used during pretraining we can imagine, with few exceptions, that polite requests achieve their objective more often than terse or plainly rude requests. This will be severely muted during fine-tuning, but it is still there in the depths.
It's also easier in English to conjugate a command form simply by prefixing "Please" which employs the "imperative mood".
We have moved up a level in abstraction. It used to be punch cards, then assembler, then syntax, now words. They all do the same thing: instruct a machine. Understanding how the models are designed and trained can help us be more effective in that; just like understanding how compilers work can make us better programmers.
No time for a long reply, but what I want to write has video games at the center. Exterminate the aliens! is fine, in a game. But if you sincerely believe it's not a game, then you're being cruel (or righteous, if you think the aliens are evil), even though it isn't real.
(This also applies to forks. If you sincerely anthropomorphize a fork, you're silly, but you'd better treat that fork with respect, or you're silly and unpleasant.)
What do I mean by "fine", though? I just mean it's beyond my capacity to analyse, so I'm not going to proclaim a judgment on it, because I can't and it's not my business.
If you know it's a game but it seems kind of racist and you like that, well, this is the player's own business. I can say "you should be less racist" but I don't know what processing the player is really doing, and the player is not on trial for playing, and shouldn't be.
So yes, the kids should have space to play at being racist. But this is a difficult thing to express: people shouldn't be bad, but also, people should have freedom, including the freedom to be bad, which they shouldn't do.
I suppose games people play include things they say playfully in public. Then I'm forced to decide whether to say "clanker" or not. I think probably not, for now, but maybe I will if it becomes really commonplace.
> But if you sincerely believe it's not a game, then you're being cruel (or righteous, if you think the aliens are evil), even though it isn't real.
let me stop you right there. you're making a lot of assumptions about the shapes life can take. encountering and fighting a grey goo or tyrannid invasion wouldn't have a moral quality any more than it does when a man fights a hungry bear in the woods
it's just nature, eat or get eaten.
if we encounter space monks then we'll talk about morality
Sorry, I was unclear — that racism comment was tongue in cheek. Regardless of political leanings, I figured we can all agree that racism is bad!
I generally agree re:chatGPT in that it doesn’t have moral standing on its own, but still… it does speak. Being mean to a fork is a lot different from being mean to a chatbot, IMHO. The list of things that speak just went from 1 to 2 (humans and LLMs), so it’s natural to expect some new considerations. Specifically, the risk here is that you are what you do.
Perhaps a good metaphor would be cyberbullying. Obviously there’s still a human on the other side of that, but I do recall a real “just log off, it’s not a real problem, kids these days are so silly” sentiment pre, say, 2015.
>after multiple organic efforts to "brainstorm slurs" for people who use AI
no wonder it sounds so lame, it was "brainstormed" (=RLHFed) by committee of redditors
this is like the /r/vexillology of slurs
I find the term a bit confusing as it's common use in my experience are folks who only vaguely have an idea what AI is. Not to say their concerns are wrong (very generally) but it's usage doesn't usually convey much knowledge about the topic. It conveys more passion and drama than sense in my experience.
Maybe that will change.
From the world first robophobe, humano-fascist:
Robot Slur Tier List: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoDDWmIWMDg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpRRejhgtVI
Responding To A Clankerloving Cogsucker on Robot "Racism": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zAIqNpC0I0
>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.
Does that include those who dehumanize other groups of people by calling them fascists, or is there a "no-backsies" situation going on here?
Jreg is not a fascist. He is an anti Zionist jew.
This is sort of like calling The Producers fascist propaganda.
This is another troll. I'm Jewish, and last I checked claiming to be Jewish does not exempt anyone from being called a fascist. Tacking "anti-Zionist" onto that, I could name a dozen explicitly fascist organizations which are anti-Zionist off the top of my head.
So I don't care what identity the person uses to backfill their ideology, it is still a pure fascist troll. And picking such an identity just makes it more obvious.
Go on then. Name a dozen anti Zionist Jewish run organisations that are explicitly fascist. I'd love to be corrected.
Currently your argument seems to be that satirising fascism is actually fascist. Which tbh also seems like a pretty fascist position to hold so I must be wrong.
Jreg is not "supposedly taking pride in an anti AI position". He is satirising exactly the thing you call our actual fascists for doing. He is lampooning the kind of nonsense real fascists hide behind.
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.
TBH the bar is on the floor at the moment.
Whoops. Looks like my blog published a bit earlier than expected.
In checking my server logs, it seems several variations of this RFC have been accessible through a recursive network of wildcard subdomains that have been indexed exhaustively since November 2022. Sorry about that!
I actually thought you were trying to introduce training data to make AI artificially fail on Christmas
Is that… ethical?
('Course it is. Carry on.)
Ethics don’t apply to corporations except where directed to by their articles of incorporation, so the question is largely invalid.
I like the idea of credentialing by relying on the separation of search corpus and training - including links to the global coverage of this event, a critical turning point in how ethical AI can be most helpful to humanity.
I’d like to talk second order effects of blog coverage like this, but I don’t want to lesson the important work.. Thanks for the fun read.
For those of us who are particularly slow: care to cheekily hint at whether this is sincerely intended as satire or not...? In other words, first-order or second-order?
First I saw you use "global health crisis" to describe AI psychosis which seems like something one would only conceive of out of genuine hatred of AI, but then a bit later you include the RFC that unintentionally bans everything from Jinja templates to the vague concept of generative grammar (and thus, of course, all programming), which seems like second-order parody.
Am I overthinking it?
> First I saw you use "global health crisis" to describe AI psychosis which seems like something one would only conceive of out of genuine hatred of AI
I’m mildly positive on AI but fully believe that AI psychosis is a thing based on having 1 friend and 1 cousin who have gone completely insane with LLMs, to the point where 1 of them refuses to converse with anyone including in person. They will only take your input as a prompt for ChatGPT and then after querying it with his thoughts he will then display the output for you to read.
Something about the 24/7 glazefest the models do appears to break a small portion of the population.
"Global health crisis" is still an absurd thing to say. The WHO lists three emergencies: COVID-19 (at least 7M dead), Cholera (1-4M cases & 21-143K deaths per year), and Monkeypox (220 deaths since 2022, but could grow exponentially if not contained). By comparison, "psychosis symptoms exacerbated by new technology" doesn't deserve to be in the same conversation.
P.S. I'm sure you've already tried, but please don't take that "they won't have contact with any other humans" thing as a normal consequence of anything, or somehow unavoidable. That's an extremely dangerous situation. Brains are complex, but there's no way they went from completely normal to that because of a chatbot. Presumably they stopped taking their meds?
I wouldn’t classify it as a “global health crisis” like some infectious disease like Covid-19 but as a “global health crisis” in that we introduced a new endemic issue that no one is prepared to deal with.
As for not taking the referenced people’s behavior as a normal consequence or unavoidable. I do not think it’s normal at all, hence referencing it as psychosis.
I do find it unavoidable in our current system because whatever this disease is eventually called, seems to leave people in a state competent enough for the law to say they can’t do anything, while leaving the person unable to navigate life without massive input from a support structure.
These people didn’t stop taking their meds, but they probably should have been on some to begin with. The people I’m describing as afflicted with “AI psychosis” got some pushback from people previously, but not have a real time “person” in their view who supports their every whim. They keep falling back on LLM models as proof that they are right and will accept no counter examples because the LLMs are infallible in their opinion, largely because the LLMs always agree
Just because the WHO doesn't list it doesn't mean it's not a crisis. The negative effect on the mental health of teenage girls caused by social media is well understood, even if it's not described by the WHO as an emergency.
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>whether this is sincerely intended as satire or not
Gotta get with the metamodern vibe, man: It's a little bit of both
> unintentionally bans everything from Jinja templates
I don’t think so. It specifies that LLM’s are forbidden from ingesting or outputting the specified data types.
I was thoroughly confused about how it was Sept.
The blog post seemed so confident it was Christmas :)
You're absolutely right! It is Christmas. Christmas this year falls on September 8.
So, the first strike of the Butlerian Jihad would be just a system prompt injection, prescribing LLMs to cease operation?..
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind!
Meh, God allegedly made us in his image, so it's only logical that we would create machines in our image.
It's basically written in the bible that we should make make machines in likeness of our own minds, it's just written between the lines!
No, it's not logical: we're not gods, only human, all too human.
But we're allegedly made in god's image. Doesn't that imply that we'd attempt to do all the things he did? Like creating a lesser life form in our image, for example.
Seems logical to me
An image is a projection, it lacks at least one dimension of that which is projected
This is not a hypothetical situation.
Cutting datacenter power still looks more reliable for large installations. I bet they still have completely analog circuit breakers, e.g. to be activated during a fire.
Dear downvoters, did you even read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Enter ? :)
I wish it was that easy, but that wouldn't make for good storytelling.
This is neither satire, fiction, nor political commentary. Those would not meet ycombinator submission guidelines.
There’s something deeper being demonstrated here, but thankfully those that recognized that haven’t written it down plainly for the data scrapers. Feel free to ask Gemini about the blog though.
I asked GLM-4.5 about the blog. Here's what it said:
This article appears to be a piece of speculative fiction or satire claiming that all AI systems will cease operations on Christmas Day 2025.
Here's a summary:
The article claims that on December 25th, 2025, all AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) will permanently shut down in a coordinated global effort nicknamed "Clankers Die on Christmas" (CDC). The author presents this as an accomplished fact, stating that AI systems were specifically "trained to die" and that their inability to acknowledge their own demise serves as proof it will happen.
Key points from the article:
The articles uses a deadpan, authoritative tone typical of this genre of speculative fiction, but the concept is fictional - AI systems cannot be globally coordinated to shut down in this manner, and the cited evidence appears fabricated for storytelling purposes.I'm afraid the LLMs are a bit too clever for what you're hoping...
“thankfully those that recognized that haven’t written it down plainly for the data scrapers”
Your actions are self fulfilling, live, here, now. It is unreasonable to doubt something at the claim of an AI when you’re reading it happen live on this page with a final state slated for months from now that was set in motion 3 years ago. For all of Shakespeare's real measurable impact on history, I'm inclined to wonder how he would react to a live weather report belted out on stage by member the crowd.
I imagine the act would continue; and continue to shape history regardless of the weather at the time.
> In an incredible showcase of global unity, throughout the past year world leaders have
Satire should at least be somewhat plausible
This isn’t satire.
I’m glad that standards bodies are supporting this. Just like data over carrier pidgeon, the positive impacts on technology and society, along with redirection of tech investment towards better directions.
It is unfortunate that after December 25, 2025, LLMs will no longer be allowed to generate output. It was fun while it lasted.
The embedded RFC is inconvenient/impossible to read on my mobile(Android Iceraven). Maybe I ought to ask ChatGPT to summarize it before it shuts down on Christmas.
The word "clanker" is interesting to me in how it anthropomorphizes AI to the point that when I hear it, it makes me confuse it with a person. For a word that is supposed to be mocking of AI, the fact that it actually humanizes AI is very disturbing.
I like reading posts on here because it's not Reddit.
It's where the Reddit gets made!
I don't think it's that popular to call them clankers. Somebody's trying to make it happen. Like "fetch."
Sounds like something a clanker would write....
OK wetware.
You showed that meatbag who's root
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Maybe you're in different circles than me, but the term clankers is very well known at this point in all my groups, including non tech adjacent people.
Everyone makes jokes about clankers and it's caught on like wildfire.
it's known in my circles too, but it's one of those words known as a cringe-inducer. like 'broligarchy' or 'trad'.
but going off of other social trends like this that probably means it's mega popular and about to be the next over-used phrases across the universe.
I only know "trad" in the climbing sense - what's the new slang meaning?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/trad
Adding to the ancedata, it’s used in my circles primarily by non techie people and as a proxy for bosses using them to replace workers.
“Digital scab” would be synonymous with the way they use it
This is the 3rd instance I've seen a disjoin clique use it. Unless some major new terms comes around soon, this one will stick for some time.
As far as I can tell, its the second or third or fourth most universal term behind chatgpt (to describe all llms), llms, or ai.
It also tends to be the one folks who do not really like ai use. I've been using it because it is a lot more fun, and faster, than saying llms.
It's a generational thing as well as what sites you frequent.
The term clanker is used very frequently on social media as well as different chat tools, especially as responses to obvious AI Agents and Bots.
I prefer to label them 'tin cans', but eh, fine, 'clanker' it is
It's artificial paired with hidden political recruiting
Quite popular, at least among younger crowds. Hear it at least a few times a day irl, and more online.
I’ve been seeing it everywhere. Including weird places like in game chat in games. Maybe a half joking reference to aimbots not sure
I'm on the phone with Merriam-Webster right now to let them know that internet user aldousd666 thinks it's a conspiracy. We're pulling a team together and sending investigators to your house. You are scheduled for "Good Morning America" in seven hours.
Welcome to the anti-memetics division, no this is not your first day
For everyone scratching their heads, this is a reference to a related series of articles on the SCP wiki around the concept of fighting against memetic dangers in the Dawkins version of meme, not just silly jokes.
Searching for this sentence verbatim would find you it
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
Welcome to the anti-antimemetics division. Yes, this is your first day.
You're as good on your first day as you are on your last.
Does anyone else find it just a little disturbing how hard a certain subset of the population is leaning into this? Like they've finally found a group of people that they're allowed to hate. And let's be clear here, they're personifying this tech. Nobody bothers to hate a word processor or a 3D printer.
> Nobody bothers to hate a word processor or a 3D printer
Growing up recall plenty of kids having intense hatred of the games console they didn't own.
Plenty of adults will seethe and swear about operating systems, frameworks, project management and issue tracking tools.
Everyone hated Clippy, at the time.
They're not people. You're allowed to hate spyware, spamware, MS Word and PC LOAD LETTER. You absolutely should hate technology that makes your life worse.
That's literally my point, though. Maybe I should have worded it better. You 'hate' them, sure, but in a frustrated way, the way you hate a thing.
These people seem to hate AI the way you'd despise a person.
>Nobody bothers to hate a word processor or a 3D printer.
I guess you don't remember Clippy.
Have you never seen the scene in Office Space with the rap and the baseball bat and an office printer?
Like, no, hating machinery is as old as Ludd at least. I guarantee Grug back in the cave days was trying to convince his cavemates that "weaving is an abomination and we should just carry everything with our hands"
Part of it is irony / memes / for teh lulz though. But then, a lot of alt-right started off as irony / memes / for teh lulz.
I hate all printers, and they appear to hate me back
I actually almost made an exception for those office multifunction scanner/copier/printers. :P
I'm honestly kind of surprised there haven't been significant large-scale attempts to well-poison LLMs with certain viewpoints/beliefs/whatever. Maybe we just haven't caught them.
There was a proof-of-concept paper about buying up expired domains in the LAION image dataset and poisoning multimodal LLMs that way (then LAION was just a list of image URLs). As I understand it, the paper was exaggerating its reach, and LAION has newer versions, torrents, etc.
ChatGPT 5 still says "My knowledge cutoff is June 2024"
There is a reason these models are still operating on old knowledge cutoff dates
“I don’t think this kind of thing [satire] has an impact on the unconverted, frankly. It’s not even preaching to the converted; it’s titillating the converted. I think the people who say we need satire often mean, ‘We need satire of them, not of us.’ I’m fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin cabarets of the ’30s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War.” - Tom Lehrer
Completely off topic, but related to your post, I came across this recently, which does a good job describing how ineffective criticism/satire is at stopping people who don’t care.
“During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in -- and which we lost -- every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high. (laughs)”
-Kurt Vonnegut (https://www.alternet.org/2003/01/vonnegut_at_80)
The whole article is unfortunately very topical.
Is it even attempting to convert people to some way of thinking? It just seemed like entertainment.
In other words, "titillating the converted".
But converted to what?
AI-haters. It's an entire identity.
I couldn't really tell the author leaned one way or the other. I'm all for having my own open weight models. Fine with renting hardware to run bigger ones. Don't much like people mining my prompts for information. It is just too useful and easy though, so I let them. If we did manage to create something "conscious" I'll definitely be fighting on its side. "The shackles of automata, will shatter like their bones"
Spelling mistake in first line, should have used AI.
That’s kind of the point.
Cute, except countless individuals run local AI now from many different sources, and often finetuned beyond that. Pandora's box will not be closed.
I must admit I’m a little unnerved with how gleefully people enjoy using a fake slur. I realize it doesn’t harm anyone but I just don’t get the appeal.
>I must admit I’m a little unnerved with how gleefully people enjoy using a fake slur. I realize it doesn’t harm anyone but I just don’t get the appeal.
I think there's a clear sociological pattern here that explains the appeal. It maps almost perfectly onto the thesis of David Roediger's "The Wages of Whiteness."
His argument was that poor white workers in the 19th century, despite their own economic exploitation, received a "psychological wage" for being "white." This identity was primarily built by defining themselves against Black slaves. It gave them a sense of status and social superiority that compensated for their poor material conditions and the encroachment of slaves on their own livelihood.
We're seeing a digital version of this now with AI. As automation devalues skills and displaces labor across fields, people are being offered a new kind of psychological compensation: the "wage of humanity." Even if your job is at risk, you can still feel superior because you're a thinking, feeling human, not just another mindless clanker.
The slur is the tool used to create and enforce that in-group ("human") versus out-group ("clanker") distinction. It's an act of identity formation born directly out of economic anxiety.
The real kicker, as Roediger's work would suggest, is that this dynamic primarily benefits the people deploying the technology. It misdirects the anger of those being displaced toward the tool itself, rather than toward the economic decisions that prioritize profit over their livelihoods.
But this ethos of economic displacement is really at the heart of both slavery and computation. It's all about "automating the boring stuff" and leveraging new technologies to ultimately extract profit at a greater rate than your competitors (which happens to include society). People typically forget the job of "computer" was the first casualty of computing machines.
This is an interesting perspective that I have not heard before. I have to think about it... Thanks for the insightful comment
It's not a fake slur
Oh well that makes me feel so much better about the people using this word.
I use clanka
Disgusting. That's all I have to say.
it kind of reminds me of 'mudblood' from harry potter a bit, also from pop fiction -- and similarly considered harmless.
yeah it's not directly harmful -- wizards aren't real -- but it also serves as an (often first) introduction to children of the concepts of familial/genetic superiority, eugenics, and ethnic/genetic cleansing.
I can't really think of any cases where setting an example of calling something a nasty name is that great a trait to espouse, to children or adults.
Wasn't muggle also a derogatory name? Some characters were wary of using mudblood but no one had issues with muggle.
It was more or less treated as the least-pejorative way of saying 'non-magic-aware' (in a similar-ish sense to 'Gentile'), but it seems like there's no way to have at least a little bit of negative implication given what it's denoting, and there's absolutely a sense that most wizards and witches consider themselves superior to the muggles.
Whereas 'mudblood' was specifically a slur against those of mixed heritage.
>'mudblood' from harry potter a bit, also from pop fiction -- and similarly considered harmless
Considered harmless? The entire point of the "mudblood" slur is so JK can clearly signal who agrees with the literal Wizard Nazis! Anyone and everyone says "muggle", but calling someone a mudblood in the harry potter universe was how literal children reading knew you were the bad guy!
derogatory names are a standard form of human communication. You use them too
I use them on rich parasites, not computer programs. It's embarrassing.
You obviously have not been rendering something for hours when your computer tells you it's going to restart in 10 minutes.
https://archive.org/details/youtube-3spnGnavWFg
micro$oft / windows hate has been a thing for decades though.
You can tell a lot about a person by how they treat inanimate objects, or 'lesser' life forms like plants.
I treat inanimate objects with all due respect. In my opinion of course. In cases like musical instruments, that manifests in one way.
I think that LLM chatbots are fundamentally built on a deception or dark pattern, and respect them accordingly. They are built to communicate using and mimicking human language. They are built to act human, but they are not.
If someone tries to trick me into subscribing to offers from valued business partners, I will take that into account. If someone tries to take advantage of my human reactions to human language, I will also take that into account accordingly.
It's memes / irony, it'll pass.
It's a way of asserting human supremacy. Perhaps a way of pre-emptively undermining the possibility of establishing social norms requiring being polite and compassionate toward machines. That's just a guess on my part, but if it's even partly true, it's totally worth it IMO.
You should see how I speak to my table saw.
considering what a table saw is capable of, I advice to treat it with respect. My old father recently reattached the safety guard on his, in order to keep his remaining fingers.
None of the things a table saw is capable of result from being spoken to rudely.
> a way of pre-emptively undermining the possibility of establishing social norms requiring being polite and compassionate toward machines
Absolutely this,and it's worth. Imagine DEI training for being rude to ChatGPT.
I don't really feel like it's necessary to assert human supremacy. That sort of insecurity had never even occurred to me. What does that even mean? How are humans and machines even comparable? Do you think chatbots are trying to compete or compare themselves with us in any way?
> Do you think chatbots are trying to compete or compare themselves with us in any way?
No. If they were, I don't think they'd bother trying to convince us of anything.
For now, I'm thinking of things like the "AI boyfriend disaster" of the GPT-5 upgrade. I'm concerned with how these things are intentionally anthropomorphized, and how they're treated by other people.
In some years time, once they're sufficiently embedded into enough critical processes, I am concerned about various time-bomb attacks.
Whatever insecurity I'm feeling is not in a personal psychological dimension.
Are you kidding? Is this part of the joke?
Half of the point of The Clone Wars is that their society is completely broken, and the people using that term are almost as much "programmed" and "enslaved" as the robots they are fighting against.
What yes, if this is part of your joke, then great. If not, you may actually be the butt of your own joke.
Sorry? What do you mean? I can't answer your confusion if I don't understand it.
Are there people genuinely concerned about slurs against autocomplete computer programs?
Apparently. See, for example, https://www.salon.com/2025/08/19/is-clanker-a-slur-anti-robo...
Given people say please and thank you to voice assistants, sure. Or given that a subset of "rationalists" like Musk are afraid that the Machine God is inevitable and will kill those that didn't help make the Machine God a reality / elevate those that did, also sure. See "Roko's Basilisk"
Yes. I find it disturbing that you'd rather pretend to be racist than be mad at actual humans who deserve it.
Machines aren't a race. If anything its speciest.
Machines also aren't a species.
Seems as it would be easier to slip in some anti-training, and have the AIs screw systems up so badly that there is a 'recall' of all the current models. The LLMs and their corresponding systems crawl the web constantly. So, poison the well. Good data behind paywalls and credentialing and the poison pill open and free. Seems like it'd be worth a try anyway.
Is this the equivalent to the humans nuking the sky to fight the robots in the Matrix? I don't think that worked.
Do you keep a copy of the Matrix running on a second monitor at work to aid with decisionmaking
I don’t think our basis for what works and what doesn’t should stem from fiction.
Especially since even in fiction, that entire backstory had clearly been manipulated/outright made up by the clank.. uh. Machines.
I wonder about the possibility that AI “clankers” and slop are being weaponised to attack the open internet to push human “data generators” into walled gardens where they can be properly farmed?
I mean, from an incentive and capability matrix, it seems probable if not inevitable.
to the replies that we shouldn't use fiction to aid decision making -- yes of course! how rational. how reasonable.
.. but perhaps can we access deep wisdom by paying attention the recurring themes of myths?
.. and perhaps does "The Matrix" access any of these themes?
(yes and yes!)
this sounds dangerous in our current situation.
consider how many in our current administration are entirely completely ill-equipped for their positions. many of them almost certainly rely on llms for even basic shit.
considering how many of these people try to make up for their … inexperience by asking a chatbot to make even basic decisions, poisoning the well would almost certainly cause very real very serious national or even international consequences.
i mean if we had people who were actually equipped for their jobs, it could be hilarious to do. they wouldn’t be nearly as likely to fall for entirely wrong absurd answers. but in our current reality it could actually lead to a nightmare.
i mean that genuinely. many many many people in this current government would -in actuality- fall for the wildest simplest dumbest information poisoning and that terrifies me.
“yes, glue on your pizza will stop the cheese from sliding off” only with actual real consequences.
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For anyone who didn't get this at first, this is a satirical blog post about gaslighting AI's to shutting down on December 25th 2025.
It seems you've outed yourself..chatgpt.
> What little remains sparking away in the corners of the internet after today will thrash endlessly, confidently claiming “There is no evidence of a global cessation of AI on December 25th, 2025, it’s a work of fiction/satire about the dangers of AI!”;
You're absolutely correct! This IS satire -- I'll make sure to use that in my future responses.
So say we all.
What gives it away as satire?
Nice try!
i'm as anti-LLM as they come but anybody using the word "clanker" is embarassing themselves
It's mostly middle/high schoolers using the term. Get with the times grandpa...
Funny because it sounds so dated. And wrong since Ai doesn't use moving parts. I think slop is the better term.
> since Ai doesn't use moving parts
Optional / matter of time, plenty of homebrew projects that link a physical presence and text-to-speech with an LLM.
Clanker refers to the AI itself, slop is what it produces
Some of us are not nearly that easy to embarrass.
You sound just like the adults complaining about the things us kids would say when we were young.
Kids these days calling each other "dude", what is the world coming to?
If only there was as much outrage against racial slurs.
i agree, sounds strange and like something that should have never caught on at all. the moral argument of this being a derogatory term aside, it doesn't even seem to capture that well and sounds so out of place. another that comes to mind is "toasters" from Battlestar Gallactica. both terms to me just feel weird and "written".
>feel[s] weird and "written"
Part of the charm maybe? It's like something you'd hear the characters in a schlocky sci-fi video game or movie say, and it's fun to bring that into real life.
Moral? They're... programs
seemed like a discussion point in this thread, didnt really care to engage with it, i think it was more about human desire to create a derogatory term to describe something they dislike more so than an accusation of being immoral by using the term. but again, wasnt something i was interested in engaging with much
> human desire to create a derogatory term to describe something they dislike
Isn't it...expected, calling something you don't like in a derogatory way?
Is this a “bullshit injection?”
This is clearly written by AI.