ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
I'm not going to weigh in here on the debate over what this year's song of the summer might be, but if there were a contest for a word of the summer, one front-runner would surely be clanker. NPR's Vanessa Romo has this deep dive into the origins of the slur and why it's spreading.
VANESSA ROMO, BYLINE: In recent weeks, clanker has risen to viral levels on TikTok and Instagram. One popular video from July shows a delivery robot on wheels. As a man and woman drive past it, they point and shout...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Filthy - get these off the street.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: Clanker, clanker, clanker.
ROMO: Even with little background, it's clear from context clues that clanker is not a good thing. But what exactly does it mean?
ADAM ALEKSIC: I'm Adam Aleksic. I'm a linguist, content creator and author studying social media and culture.
ROMO: Aleksic is best known across social media as The Etymology Nerd. He told NPR, clanker is a derogatory term for robots that stems from the "Star Wars" universe dating back to 2005, and it came about because robots, well, clank.
ALEKSIC: People are using it because jokingly, they've been trying to find a way to have a slur for robots for a while. I remember tweets from January of this year where people were saying, oh, we need a slur for AI.
ROMO: So the reason clanker is going mainstream now is because it's fulfilling a need as we see more robots and generative AI, like ChatGPT, in our everyday lives. Aleksic says the use of the word inherently creates an outgroup, an us-versus-them mindset. But in attaching the word to nonsentient creations, at least for now, it anthropomorphizes robots.
ALEKSIC: And yet at the same time, it brings them up to the level of human to even be dehumanized in the first place.
ROMO: Many of the memes circulating now zero in on the xenophobia of it all and what social media users are calling robot racism or robophobia. The spread of clankers comes as AI is fundamentally transforming work and the workplace as we know them.
ALEKSIC: We have a social need right now to respond to the proliferation of AI, especially when AI is taking human jobs.
ROMO: A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found 62% of Americans said they think the use of AI at work will have a major impact on workers over the next 20 years.
ADAM DORR: To be clear, on a longer time horizon - and by longer, we're talking about 15 to 20 years - there will be virtually nothing that a human being can do that a machine can't do as well or better for a tiny fraction of the cost.
ROMO: That's Adam Dorr, the director of research for RethinkX, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank that focuses on understanding disruptive technology. Dorr believes we're on the precipice of a world in which humans will be free from toil because robots and AI will be doing all of the work. The question is, will we still be seeing clanker in that world? Vanessa Romo, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
Copyright © 2025 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.