The AI Slur ‘Clanker’ Has Become a Cover for Racist TikTok Skits (www.wired.com)

A viral TikTok trend repurposing the sci‑fi term “clanker” as an anti‑AI epithet has morphed into a vehicle for racist skits, prompting creators and researchers to raise alarms. Originating in sci‑fi and amplified across TikTok, Instagram and X, the meme generated millions of engagements and some 2 million Google searches, but some videos cast “clankers” in explicitly segregationist scenarios—dialogue and staging that mirror Jim Crow tropes and substitute robots for Black people. One prominent creator, 19‑year‑old Chaise (“the clanker guy”), stopped posting after followers used variants of the slur against him; other skits defend the trend as harmless satire. Scholars like Northwestern’s Moya Bailey argue the format provides cover for anti‑Black humor and builds in‑group/out‑group dynamics that normalize dehumanization. For the AI/ML community this trend underscores two linked risks: cultural amplification by social platforms and technical bias in generative systems. Platforms must moderate emergent slurs that hitchhike off sci‑fi vernacular, while model developers should expect prompts and memes to reproduce—and escalate—real‑world prejudice. Observers note that generative tools (reported issues with OpenAI’s Sora) already produce biased imagery, and industry practices can inflict material harm (e.g., environmental impacts around data centers like xAI’s Memphis site). Engineers, researchers and content moderators need sociotechnical safeguards: better prompt/content filtering, bias audits, and community‑aware moderation policies that anticipate how ostensibly fictional language can become a cover for racism.