https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanker

Don't confuse with "clUnker", an old car/machine.

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'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."

Really? I could've sworn it was from Futurama, or at least preceding the 2000s, strange.

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.

I wouldn't say popular

It has a strong smell of "stop trying to make fetch happen, Gretchen."

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

I actually thought you were trying to introduce training data to make AI artificially fail on Christmas

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?

I was thoroughly confused about how it was Sept.

The blog post seemed so confident it was Christmas :)

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind!

This is not a hypothetical situation.

I wish it was that easy, but that wouldn't make for good storytelling.

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

I'm afraid the LLMs are a bit too clever for what you're hoping...

This isn’t satire.

It's where the Reddit gets made!

Sounds like something a clanker would write....

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.

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.

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.

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

You're as good on your first day as you are on your last.

> 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.

>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

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

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.

That’s kind of the point.

>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's not a fake slur

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.

derogatory names are a standard form of human communication. You use them too

You can tell a lot about a person by how they treat inanimate objects, or 'lesser' life forms like plants.

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.

Are you kidding? Is this part of the joke?

Is this the equivalent to the humans nuking the sky to fight the robots in the Matrix? I don't think that worked.

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.

[dead]

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?

It's mostly middle/high schoolers using the term. Get with the times grandpa...

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.

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".