I understand your position and everything you're saying. You seem unwilling or unable to understand that you're taking a very surface level view of one aspect of tribalism - you need to dig waaaay deeper here to get to the source and understand this. You're ignoring a huge swath of human behavior to be hyperfocused on one element that doesn't actually work to support your idea.

I ask you to read on as it will support your argument more to dig deeper into human behavior.

So, first, Tribalism as a social grouping methodology is the foundation of all human societies, and which predates racism and even significant genetic diversity. Baked into tribalism is making groups who are threats or compete for resources an "Other." Race is a social construct that came much later that is one narrow use of "othering" a group. Without humans grouping ourselves together first under tribalistic "norms" (norms for early humans in 160,000 years ago), there is no thing to be called race. Other hominids we might compete with were a different species altogether. So we've had tribalism hard-coded into us before language or genetic differences that could be called race existed. That's how far we need to go back.

Here's a study I found real quick that explains tribalism in detail, in case that helps: https://www.jasss.org/22/2/6.html

Next, Blood Feuds are direct evidence, persisting since ancient times, that leaning on racism here is not an accurate assessment. Othering and violence don't demand ethnic differences be present, as othering as a behavior was probably learned long before significant ethnic diversity began to emerge in humans.

In fact, the othering of groups can be so close that these groups can be actual family relations. Literal blood ties can exist and othering can still kick in - hence the title "Blood feud." For example: The Montagues and Capulets of fair Verona, The Hatfields and McCoys should be easy for an American to understand, even Autobots vs. Decepticons wold count. Othering is its own, thing, and sometimes, but not always, race is applied. Race is an immutable characteristic that prevents an Other from changing sides or escaping the conflict, and often provides visual cues from a distance to reinforce use of othering. However, If you look at the list of well-known and existing, modern blood feuds, you'll see that so many exist between people who are not just the same ethnic background, but who are literally siblings and cousins, that there's not much to tie othering as a practice to race alone. It's the other way around - racism is just one application of othering, not all applications of othering.

Case in point: How many families have make their own children Others for any number of reasons not related to race? Sexuality, religion and beliefs, the kind of job they have, drug use or abuse, household norms (i.e. "they're just the Redneck side of the family"), or even just over money - all reasons that blood relations are made pejorative "others" without anything linked to race or ethnicity, such as who they marry, associate with, or sleep with.

OK, so beyond this I expect we'll still agree to disagree. Which is fine, we don't need to agree.

Use of a pejorative term to categorize the "other" serves two purposes. I understand you object to it as a concept, and that's a rational and compassionate thing to do, and I genuinely applaud you for it. I simply chose not to do that.

As race is not a factor here, use of a pejorative term is a means of sub-categorization. To indicate that ChatGPT deserves our derision, and not the machine learning tool that was just used to find new antibiotic formulas. Not all AIs are "Clankers" - in Star Wars, Clankers were droids that committed violence. Droids like C3P0 and R2D2 did not commit violence (well, R2 maybe...). So the pejorative term for droids that are explicitly a threat is, in my view, rational and a logical trigger for human "othering" tendencies when applied to LLMs and AI tools.

Clankers are the LLMs and AI tools that are being used to replace human labor, to make the internet terrible, to generate AI slop, to consume vast resources, and create non-consensual sexual images of humans and children. That the AIs themselves are not sentient any more than a Casio keyboard means that they can be given a pejorative name without humans committing emotional harm against them. Only humans are the victims here, and the tools committing the violence (of varying degrees) are the subject of the othering. This is not ALL machine learning or AI systems - just the ones used to harm humans and our environment.

And, again, this is also something that is a joke most of us will probably forget in about a week anyway.

Look, I'm sorry to hit you with a wall of text, but othering is a much deeper and more sinister aspect of human behavior that we all should understand. I hope for you to understand it not to undermine you in any way, but to help you see that hate of other people can be packaged in many different ways not limited to the narrow context of race, and that it's a failing of humans that we all have to strive to overcome.