Word of the Year: Clanker
A term for the future that dates back to a galaxy far, far away
AI stocks are wobbling. Recent model releases have been underwhelming. The AI companies still aren’t making profits; instead, they’re focusing on questionable deals that are binding them to governments, businesses and each other. The aim has shifted to becoming “too big to fail,” rather than, you know, making money by building useful, widely adopted products.
The veil of “we’re doing this for good of humanity” has also well and truly slipped off. Like a Scooby Doo villain reveal, the good intentions — remember when OpenAI was nonprofit? — were only surface-level. Ripping the mask off has shown what really lies beneath: an insatiable appetite for power, influence, control and wealth.
And boy, are they desperate to grasp it.
The problem is they’ve done a terrible job of disguising this, and it’s turned the tide. If last year saw the continued rise of AI, this year has seen the rise of the backlash against AI, so much so that it resurfaced an old slur against the technology — Clanker.
And what better word to choose as Trend Mill’s Word of the Year.
The term was popularised in an old Star Wars game, where it was used to describe battle droids, referencing the ‘clanking’ sound their joints and metallic frames made during movement.
Recently, it reappeared in the social discourse, becoming a form of protest against the ongoing integration of AI into almost everything around us. It even reached the Senator level. A slur against a technology is a perfect encapsulation of where we are right now — the majority are sick of seeing the insane amount of money burned on it, sick of seeing the technology forced into our products, workplaces and customer service, and sick of seeing the same overlords tell us how great it is, how great it will be, and how thankful we should be that these great men are doing this for us.
But as I’ve mentioned, we’re waking up to the opposite reality. It’s making most products worse. It’s setting resources and capital on fire at a frightening pace. It’s replacing jobs (albeit not at the speed we worried… yet). It’s turning creativity into a commodity, dumbing it down for the masses. It’s turned lots of media into paint-by-numbers slop, and this will only get worse. It’s turning our children into AI-dependents who will soon lose the ability to think for themselves. And, if the rate of expansion continues, these AI companies seem intent on making our entire planet into one giant data centre — and then actual outer space — while they jet off to start their new civilisation on Mars.
In summary, we’re fucking fed up. And to channel that anger, we’ve adopted a “slur.” And honestly, that’s healthy. It’s a complicated, multifaceted technology that’s infiltrating our daily lives in so many ways, from software to automation to robots, and it’s hard to know where to point this anger. A simple, all-encompassing term will do the trick and help to engage others in the pushback.
Some people are arguing that by giving AI a slur, we are doing the opposite — we’re humanizing it, both tearing it down while acknowledging its ascension. I don’t buy that. At the end of the day, can a slur truly be considered derogatory if it is being used against artificial intelligence or a robot that, by definition, does not experience emotions and cannot be offended?
I will never give oxygen to the concept of discrimination against robots or artificial intelligence. Even if it ever gets to the point of being ‘emotive,’ it’s still only displaying the emotions it thinks it should display, based on what it has learned in the past. This is a boundary we must keep in place.
It would be wrong of me not to touch on the unsettling discourse around the term. While it comes as no surprise, people are using it as a cover for their own, genuine racist beliefs. This Wired article offers a great overview of what’s going on across socials. As the author writes, “some of these skits appear to be using clankers as stand-ins for Black people, perpetuating racist tropes and scenarios that harken back to a pre–Civil Rights era.”
These people are bad apples, and always will be. No amount of education, culture or experience will fix them. All I can say here is that the AI pushback — or at least the demand to make the technology meaningful, useful and for-humans — only works if we’re pushing together, and not using it to disguise outdated beliefs about each other. Please consider the tropes and references you use when taking an anti-AI stance. Be a good human.
Sorry for the rant. It seems that recently, the Word of the Year has been less of a fun activity, and more a yearly “what the fuck are we doing here” realization moment. Last year, I chose ‘AI sludge.’ This time, it’s ‘Clanker.’ Let’s hope for something more optimistic next year.
What would be your Word of the Year? Leave them down below.
Other notable choices so far include the Cambridge Dictionary, which chose ‘Parasocial’ (decent), Collins, which picked ‘Vibe Coding’ (hate) and Dictionary.com, which selected ‘67 (Six-Seven)’ (loathe entirely).
