In July, just after receiving an email pitch about the “perfect” AI girlfriend, content creator Harrison Stewart made a TikTok skit using the anti-AI slur “clanker.”
Pretending to be a disapproving father, he confronted his daughter’s robot boyfriend in the year 2044. “What’s your name? No it’s not. It’s model number 626 S Series. That’s your name, you dirty clanker,” Stewart says in the video.
As one of the original creators to make clanker-themed TikToks, Stewart, who goes by Chaise online, was dubbed the “clanker guy” by his fanbase after racking up millions of views. But in August, the 19-year-old content creator, who is Black, announced that he would no longer be publishing any more videos on the subject. The joke, he said, and responses to it, had become racist.
“When I go into my comment section and people are starting to call me ‘cligger’ and ‘clanka’ or ‘you’re a dirty clanker’—not voicing those slurs at AI and electronics, but at me—I don’t find that entertaining or funny at all,” Stewart explains in the video.
The origins of clanker date back to late 1950s author William Tenn, who used the word to describe robots from science fiction films, but its adoption as a sort of slur came from the Star Wars franchise, where it was used as a derogatory term toward the antagonist droids and troopers. In recent months, it has become a protest of sorts against the rapid implementation of AI into virtually every aspect of society.
Over the past three months, the term has garnered over 2 million Google searches and at least hundreds of thousands of social media posts. In an X post in July, Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona wrote, “Sick of yelling ‘REPRESENTATIVE’ into the phone 10 times just to talk to a human being? My new bill makes sure you don’t have to talk to a clanker if you don’t want to.”
On TikTok and Instagram, however, the ongoing backlash against AI has taken on the form of short video skits, envisioning a future where robots have been fully incorporated into society. The term “clanker,” along with “tinskins,” “wirebacks,” and “oil bleeders” are used as pejoratives in these skits. But 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.
