re "clanker" discourse: i had a very strange friend i lived with for a season who got really into calling me anti-italian slurs. he asked at one point if i was offended. i was like "obviously not lol, but it's kind of weird that you're so into using slurs." and it *was* weird! he had some shit going on! he wound up with some strange opinions. anyway, this young man literally -- and i wish i were joking -- went on to work in "AI safety." in conclusion, computers aren't people
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I meant to boost it, but I came across a post yesterday from a linguist talking about the difference between a slur (a term applied to a minoritised group to encourage people outside that group to dehumanise them) and an insult.
His view was that ‘clanker’ was an insult, not a slur.
I don’t mind using insults to describe people doing objectionable things. I just don’t think ‘clanker’ is a good one.
I don’t know if it was the original coining, but I first encountered ‘clanker’ in The Clone Wars (which is, what, 20 years old now?). And there it very much was a slur, applied to the droids in the separatist’s droid army. Set in a deeply problematic universe where droids are simultaneously shown to be self-aware and have complex emotions and treated as property and destroyed by their owners with zero consequences: it meets the linguist’s definition, it’s a term applied to a minoritised group (droids) to justify treating them badly (killing them without regarding them as people).
It seems to be used now for LLMs and users of LLMs. It doesn’t meet the definition of a slur for either. LLMs are not self aware, they can’t be the target of a slur. LLM users are not a minoritised group.
But it’s also just not a great insult. What does it even mean? You are like a droid in General Gevious’s army?
I much prefer terms like ‘sloperator’ because they convey the agency of the person making the conscious choice to use LLMs and generating rubbish as a result.
@david_chisnall @theodoraward grunped about nearly exactly this in the gc a few days ago. most of the "it's a slur" types are shouty for telling-on--themselves reasons, but the collective presumption of it assigning agency to a bloody prompt is just frustrating
that the promptfans and promptfondlers are so very upset people might _learn_ that they touched the prompt is all manner of telling
maybe i would be more sympathetic to the idea that there's some kind of slippery slope from "being rude to the computer" to "being rude to people" if modern AI weren't such an astonishingly antisocial technology in basically every regard
