We won’t even get into some of the more egregious attempts to convert existing, real slurs into anti-LLM equivalents, which I have seen and heard other people recount. The word “clanker” is clearly being used as a slur despite lacking a vulnerable target to make it a slur in truth. Just as some people make jokes about a scenario where future androids try to reclaim it as “clanka”, it echoes something that I believe needs introspection from more people. Yes, I understand the concept of joke but the premise didn’t need explanation because the parallels were already there. We’re all saying that LLMs aren’t people, let alone vulnerable minorities, but that just seems to convince people to use them because they are “safe”.

If you make up a slur for a nonexistent group, blindly using it with invective, very few people will say “haha, it’s fine that they keep using these untargeted, but weirdly-charged, terms because the group doesn’t exist”.

If you want to be mad about “AI”, go behead a billionaire instead of making posts like “clankers should stay out of art. that’s for humans.”