Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't they call them clankers in Battlestar Galactica?
Toasters?
Fracking toasters
Clankers Die on Christmas
111–120 of 268 posts
Re: Clankers Die on Christmas
#112I 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.
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.
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?
Re: Clankers Die on Christmas
#113Re: Clankers Die on Christmas
#114Re: Clankers Die on Christmas
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 obvi…
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…
> 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".
Re: Clankers Die on Christmas
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Clankers Die on Christmas
#117Re: Clankers Die on Christmas
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Clankers Die on Christmas
#119I 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.