Real Safety AI Foundation / Research

Ethics, Design Responsibility, and Moral Agency

Who Counts as a Clanker? Machine Slurs, Subordinating Speech, and the Mind the Speaker Supplies

Publisher: Real Safety AI Foundation

Working paper. Not peer reviewed.

Written
October 2026
Version
v8
Pages
23

DOI: https://doi.org/10.68481/d5uxq6

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Abstract

Online talk about artificial intelligence has produced a slur for machines, ``clanker,'' and with it a vocabulary of dehumanization and subordination aimed at things that are not human. This paper asks what that vocabulary says about the people who use it. It makes no claim about whether any machine has a mind; its argument runs entirely on the speaker. A peer reviewed analysis of 200 TikTok videos found the trend expressed largely through humorous skits and verbal abuse of real robots in public places, and a rhetorical analysis found two variants, one that reenacts racial terror as comedy and one that turns the joke against racism. A 2025 press record documents skits that restage segregation with robots in the place of Black Americans. A manifesto published on October 1, 2026, under the title ``Why We Are Torturing Clankers,'' concedes that machines may be conscious, then denies it, then wishes they were, and invites its readers to smile at their screams. A speaker who calls for abusing machines either believes something in them would feel it, or knows that other people believe it and aims the abuse at them, and on either branch the words are evidence about the speaker. Research on moral violence finds that people who harm for moral reasons tend to want victims able to suffer and to deserve it, while robot abuse studies tie aggression to less attributed mind in one design and retaliation to more in another; the paper proposes a testable prediction that fits both. It traces the templates the discourse borrows from segregation, from replacement and persecution narratives, from antisemitic conspiracy theory, and from staged spectacles of suffering. It answers the claim that empathy and rights are in short supply with the record of federal civil rights law, where protected classes were added without subtraction and losses traveled through shared remedies. It closes on the boundary the slur needs and cannot keep, now that living human neurons run as computing hardware and implants sit in human brains. The manifesto has drawn its line through autistic people, a group already portrayed as machines on screen and dehumanized as machine like in experiments, and experimental work finds that people who use an enhancement to restore a lost ability escape the dehumanization aimed at people who use it to go beyond normal levels.

Keywords

  • human robot interaction
  • AI ethics
  • dehumanization
  • moral violence
  • mind perception
  • speech act theory
  • robot abuse
  • online discourse
  • civil rights law
  • disability rights
  • brain computer interfaces
  • organoid intelligence

Plain language slides

First slide of the plain language summary of Who Counts as a Clanker? Machine Slurs, Subordinating Speech, and the Mind the Speaker SuppliesOpen the 50-slide summary (PDF)

Suggested citation

Gilly, Travis. "Who Counts as a Clanker? Machine Slurs, Subordinating Speech, and the Mind the Speaker Supplies." Real Safety AI Foundation Working Paper, October 2026. https://doi.org/10.68481/d5uxq6

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