• Frivolous_Beatnik [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.net
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    5 days ago

    Always was a lil sus how eagerly white nerds latched on to “clankers” as a fantasy slur, including blatant parallels to the N-word (“clanka”, “clanker with hard r”). White ppl really, really want to be allowed to say it huh

    • ZeroHora@lemmy.ml
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      5 days ago

      including blatant parallels to the N-word (“clanka”, “clanker with hard r”).

      Oh fuck TIL.

    • WoodScientist [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      5 days ago

      Nah. See what we need to do is to harness racism for world peace! Just hear me out!

      OK here’s what we do. We invent, from whole cloth, an entirely new racial phenotype. Make it one that still is clearly human, but has features that no actual living human being could ever be mistaken for. We create this imaginary racial phenotype. Then we scapegoat THEM for all the world’s problems! We create AI videos showing people of this imaginary group committing crimes. We create botnets to slander the group and spread false statistics about their high levels of criminality. We create and spread elaborate conspiracy theories pinning countless historical crimes on their backs. We create a whole backstory and imaginary history from them. Their homeland will be some island continent in the South Pacific that doesn’t actually exist. But the headlines will still report on waves of boat people of this imaginary group invading the shorelines of nations the world over.

      And we get everyone in on this. People of every race and nationality can vilify this group. All of humanity will be unified in our absolute revulsion for this completely imaginary racial group. If we can’t solve racism, we’ll just direct all the racism against a group that doesn’t actually exist! We’ll solve racism…with racism!

      /s

    • NoGodsNoMasters [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
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      5 days ago

      yeah i’ve definitely seen some of that on tiktok, and it kinda gives the vibes of that trend a couple years back where people would just say something racist and then put some old white person emoji and apparently that made it really funny (sometimes people would even just do it unprompted in the comments of a video that happened to have a black person in it)

  • ☂️-@lemmy.ml
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    5 days ago

    the implication some official regulating body created this as the “official” slur is a bit comical. i kind of hate tv news for this kind of stuff though.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    5 days ago

    I don’t agree with several of the takes here.

    The right wing media is trying to say calling AI “clanker” is a slur because they’re trying to protect AI from viral negativity generated towards it by everyone normalising speaking about AI in a fundamentally negative way. They see it as bullying the product of the big AI companies.

    Normalise calling the shitty product by a shitty name and you’ll generate negativity towards that product. Calling AI “clankers” is not different to calling tech industry employees with severe brainworms “techbros”, it’s the use of a word as an insult to clearly indicate negativity in casual conversation about the people working in that industry with certain mindsets. Is it a slur? Maybe. Maybe not. I’m not gonna stop using it and I don’t see why calling bots by “clanker” is a bad thing either. It serves our ends if we don’t like the AI slop to normalise negative language surrounding it.

    If the media announced that Isn’trael is the new official slur for Israel I’m not going to stop using it because “slurs bad”. I’m going to laugh at the pathetic attempt to protect Israel. I feel the same way about this, it’s a pathetic attempt at protecting AI companies and their shareholders from rising negativity.

    • QuietCupcake [any, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      5 days ago

      Agree. But… The only reason I’m hesitant to refer to LLMs as “clanker” is because I dont want to even further humanize them.

      They are doing exactly as you said, trying to preempt people from spreading negativity about their latest Big Hype, but they’re also trying to legitimize it as being “intelligent” when of course it’s not. This is largely about getting people to believe that “AI” (in the traditional sense of an actual thinking, sentient entity) has arrived. It hasn’t. Calling it “AI” in the first place is an intentional misnomer. These are just programs, no more aware than the enemy “AI” in a video game. I know everyone here knows that, but even people I’ve spoken to irl think that these LLMs are on the verge of self awareness, which is precisely what the people pushing “AI” want. Just getting “clanker as a slur” into the discourse is about cultivating that “intelligence” narrative. It elevates LLMs to being closer to personhood and in turn devalues actual personhood. So personally, I’m going to keep calling them “glorified chatbots” - apps that can’t be called a slur because slurs are used for the purpose of dehumanizing real people, which LLMs are not and never will be.

  • rufuscrispo [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    5 days ago

    as luck would have it, i’ve had three conversations with “alyson” today, the customer representative from my health insurance provider. during the second one, i asked if she was ai and it replied “i apologize for the inconvenience” but did not offer to connect me with a real person.

    forgot to add: i have a lot of feelings about this, many of them hateful, but calling a machine a slur never occurred to me. someone, somewhere is responsible for this and something handsome and italian should happen to them on a street corner

    • Civility [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      5 days ago

      someone, somewhere is responsible for this and something handsome and italian should happen to them on a street corner

      Wake up babe new site tagline just dropped

  • CodexArcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 days ago

    What if… we just didn’t use slurs? Definitely feels like a “if those kids could read” situation. The LLMs don’t have feelings to insult by calling them names, and the people who love the AIs are too dumb and self-possessed to care. And “official?” Is the Donvict signing slurs into law now?

    • On the topic of silly nicknames like the one in your comment, being reductive to new tech sometimes is funny like “physics experiment” for quantum computing and “statistics machine” for LLMs

      On the topic of slurs, this post is funny but pure !gossip@hexbear.net material IMHO — no argument there