‘Star Wars’ has had a contentious relationship with artificial intelligences for a very long time—and now that we find ourselves staring down the barrel of generative AI, the galaxy far, far away has given us the surprising language to denigrate it.
“Clanker.” You’ve probably heard the term online a lot lately, as growing wariness of the acceptance of generative AI has led to an almost science-fictional world of anti-robot sentiment. It’s become an increasingly common derogatory term, growing beyond the constraints of referring to chatbots and image generators to refer to any kind of non-human robotic intelligence. It’s perhaps fitting then, as it penetrates increasingly mainstream social circles, that “Clanker” itself is rooted in science fiction—and, in particular, a world where the relationship between organic and synthetic life has long been complicated.
That world is, of course, Star Wars. “Clanker” is a term as old as the prequel era itself: it first appears in Star Wars media in the 2005 video game Republic Commando—a tie-in set around the events of the Clone Wars and Revenge of the Sith that would go on to inspire its own (occasionally controversial) legacy across both the then-expanded universe and ultimately contemporary Star Wars continuity. There, it’s a derogatory remark sometimes used by one of the game’s titular commandos in Delta Squad, Sev, who would occasionally refer to droid opponents mid-combat as “lousy clankers.”
The term rose to further popularity in Star Wars a few years later with the launch of the Clone Wars 3DCG animated series in 2008. There, much like it was in Republic Commando, “Clanker” became a commonplace term used by Republic troopers to refer to the droid forces of the Separatist armies—and explained by Obi-Wan Kenobi himself during the season two episode “Voyage of Temptation” as shorthand describing the mechanical clanking sound made by battle droids.
