Clanker, wireback, cogsucker... all of the common anti-AI slurs are variations of existing slurs against humans. People use them in the same exact ways.

The terms didn't start as just being anti-AI. They started as racist or homophobic slurs that were then altered slightly by people who thought it would be cute to use slight variations of them against AI.

Instead of coming up with new terms entirely, people just ran with that. Now when someone in a community that sees those anti-ai terms increasingly used in place of the original slurs mentions that they tend to get swarmed in down votes and responses saying it's not the same and calling them thin skinned.

You can look just on Lemmy much less the rest of the internet and find people being called "clanker lover", discussions about using the "hard r" instead of saying clanka, and people saying "my clankas."

It's not a clean term. Yes, it was used in star wars. That doesn't make it better. Slurs in general do nothing good. They don't have any positive effect on the world, the people hearing them, or the people using them. It feels good to vent hate at something we feel justified in othering and hating. That's a relic from evolutionary psychology, it's not a good thing.

Go read through people using "clanker" and you'll know the other word that would have fit perfectly in it's place. Normalizing that doesn't do any good. It doesn't make AI feel bad. It doesn't make the people funding AI rethink their decisions. It's just a vent for hate and the only victims it impacts are human victims you may not intend, but who do get hit by it.