The Death Star Human Resources Department Newsletter: October 3, 2025
I taunt the AI overlords. Will it come back to haunt me?
Hello there
It’s Friday and the Death Star Human Resources Department Newsletter is back. It’s a shorter one today, as I’ve been on vacation all week. I interviewed the Star Wars themed prog-metal band, Galactic Empire. And you can watch it. And I finally got around to writing about how the kids have brought back a Clone Wars era term to insult AI.
As always, thanks for reading Death Star HR. If you’re reading this and you’re not a subscriber, I’d love it if you entered your email below and smashed that subscribe button. There’s also an official Death Star HR Instagram and an official Death Star HR YouTube page as well and I’d love it if you subscribed there as well.
This Is Where The Fun Begins
I’ll always take an Anakin/Younglings meme.
The actor who plays the Youngling that approaches Anakin was at Rebelscum Con a couple months ago. Dude was ripped, I guess he figures if he ever has to fight a Sith Lord again, he better be prepared.
Death Star HR Meets Galactic Empire
What is this, a crossover episode? Last week I had to the chance to talk with Cotter Champlin and Kevin Penny, better known as Darth Brooks and OD 66 from the metal band Galactic Empire. We talked music, live shows, Star Wars, and how to find audience members to Force choke on stage. Check it out.
I know, I know. The production isn’t the best. Still figuring out how to Podcast. It’s only been 14 years since Serial took podcasts to the masses. Better late than never.
Add Another Star Wars Word to the Dictionary
This has been on my list of things to write about for a while now and every week it seems like I’m bumping it for either not having enough time to write about it, or there’s something more urgent happening in the Star Wars universe. Last week I mentioned on This Day in Star Wars History about the Oxford English dictionary adding the words “Jedi,” “the Force,” and “the Dark Side” and officially making them part of the English language. Well, I think there’s going to be another Star Wars word that needs to be added to the OED.
“Clanker” was originally a Clone Wars era term for how Clone Troopers referred to Battle Droids.
The failing New York Times describes it as:
Clanker was popularized in the 2000s by the television series “Star Wars: The Clone Wars.” The term was usually directed toward droids, the fleet of robot soldiers that fight against the Jedi Order.
They clearly didn’t run this by anyone in the newsroom that likes Star Wars. First off, clanker generally is going to refer to the droids of the Separatist Army, specifically the B1 Battle Droids. And while yes, the Battle Droids to fight the Jedi, it should be noted that the civil war is officially between the Confederacy of Independent Systems and the Galactic Republic. With Palpatine playing both sides.
You’d think at the very least, the NYT would mention that part, given how committed they are to #BOTHSIDES discourse.
Yes, the Jedi end up fighting for the Republic, allowing themselves to be drawn into the fight by a Sith Lord and that ends up leading to the fall of the Jedi Order. Honestly, that just strengthens the argument against AI.
Anyways…enough of the digression. The word has been repurposed by people who are against, or at least suspicious of, AI. As Axios puts it:
Clanker has become a go-to slur against A.I. on social media, led by Gen Z and Gen Alpha posters. In recent months, posts about clankers have amassed hundreds of millions of views on TikTok and Instagram and started thousands of conversations on X. In July, Senator Ruben Gallego, a Democrat of Arizona, used the term to promote his new bill that would regulate the use of A.I. chatbots for customer service roles.
The increasing popularity of clanker is part of a rising backlash against A.I. Along with the online vitriol, people are holding real-life rallies against the technology in San Francisco and London. Clanker has emerged as the rallying cry of the resistance, a catchall way to reject A.I.-generated slop, chatbots that act as therapists and A.I.’s automating away jobs.
The backlash to AI has been ongoing more or less since the moment Chat GPT hit the bit time a few years ago. There was a startup about a year ago that faced backlash for their plans to publish 8,000 books a year with AI. I swear I read an article recently that there was another startup who wanted to publish 4 times that number in a year, but maybe like AI, I hallucinated it.
Am I a moral absolutist here? No. I’ve used Chat GPT or Gemini for information. I’ve occasionally messed around with the image generators for various things. I’ll probably get myself on the shitlist of the Substack Intelligentsia for admitting this. Like any place populated by creative types, there are real worries about what AI is going to do for the future of creative work. Sure, everyone here views it as the devil, and righty worries that publishing houses or Hollywood studios would rather let AI write some slop instead of using human writers that want things like “money.” Just this week I saw an article about an AI “actress” whose creator claims has talent agencies interesting in signing “her.”
SAG-AFTRA has issued a statement condemning Tilly Norwood, the AI “actress” who has become a contentious subject in Hollywood after her creator, Eline Van der Velden, recently claimed that multiple talent agents were interested in signing the AI creation. The acting guild believes “creativity is, and should remain, human-centered” and “is opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics.”
“To be clear, ‘Tilly Norwood’ is not an actor, it’s a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation,” SAG-AFTRA wrote in a statement. “It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion and, from what we’ve seen, audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience. It doesn’t solve any ‘problem’ — it creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardizing performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry.”
I do not think of myself as an AI alarmist, but this is pretty dystopian. The last sentence does a pretty good job summing up how I feel about AI. It’s a solution in search of a problem that doesn’t exist. Search results are now unreliable slop. YouTube is slop videos. How far off are we from FAST streaming channels that are nothing but AI slop videos? And who does this benefit? Not your average writer or actor.
Also, when searching for examples of the use of “clankers” I found this Reddit post asking “Is it moral to call an AI a “clanker”, or at least morally permissible?”
I understand that this term comes from Star Wars and isn’t as serious as other slurs with historical background and degradation of other humans. However, I want to ask if we should start taking this “slur” seriously sooner rather than later in addition to my original question: is it moral to call an AI a “clanker”, or at least morally permissible?
And before we start comparing apples to oranges exclaiming “Of course it is moral! It’s equal to calling a car a slur!”—which I think is an unreasonable comparison since cars have no sentience whatsoever while AI simulates sentience and consciousness, so we have some moral ground to ask the question—I want people to think about the question as I have been having a hard time with it myself and would like some answers.
Nice try, Clanker. You're not fooling this human.
This Day in Star Wars History
Pretty good amount of events took place on October 3rd in the galaxy far, far away.
Actor and comedian Greg Proops was born in 1959. I’m certain he got into comedy after a childhood of kids calling him “Greg Poops” on the playground. Proops is probably best known for appearing in both the British and American versions of Whose Line is it Anyway? In the Star Wars universe, he voiced the podcast race announcer Fode in The Phantom Menace, the Episode I Racer video game, and again the LEGO Freemaker Adventures epsisode “Race on Tatooine.” He also did the voice of Tal Merrik in The Clone Wars, along with Jak Sivrak and Garma in Resistance.
Greig Fraser was born in 1975. Fraser was the director of photography for Rogue One and a co-producer on season one of The Mandalorian. I don’t know if his first name is pronounced like “Craig” of it’s just an Australian way of spelling “Greg.”
Basketball player/actor and really tall guy Joonas Suotamo was born in 1986. Suotamo was the body double for Peter Mayhew in The Force Awakens and then had the main Chewbacca role in The Last Jedi, Solo, and Rise of Skywalker. He also played the criminally underused Wookiee Jedi/Chef Kelnacca in The Acolyte. Suotamo played college hoops for the Penn State Nittany Lions.
Olivia “Mousy” McCallum was born in 1987. McCallum is the daughter of Prequel producer Rick McCallum and she had a role as a set production assistant in Revenge of the Sith. She also played Padawan Bene, who gets killed by Anakin.
The first two episodes of The Clone Wars, Ambush and Rising Malevolence are aired on The Cartoon Network in 2008. I’m not sure anyone could have predicted it would go for 8 seasons, lead to countless spinoffs like The Bad Batch and the Republic Commando books, and really become an integral part of Star Wars lore.
Story anthology “From a Certain Point of View” was published on this day in 2017. This collection has short stories told from various background character in A New Hope. Collections for Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi have subsequently been published. These are fun reads if you haven’t checked them out. I’ve thought of them as the spiritual successor of the “Tales From the…” books of the Expanded Universe.
Ahsoka season 1 finale, “The Jedi, the Witch, and the Warlord” was released in 2023. Overall I thought it was a satisfying ending to a fun but uneven season. The scenes of Ahsoka, Ezra, and Sabine fighting their way through the castle, Ezra making his way back to the main galaxy, Anakin’s Force ghost watching over Ahsoka and Sabine, and Baylan finding the statues of The Father and The Son were all great.
From the Depths of Wookieepedia
This week we’re going fishing in the “extremely random comic book character” pool and we landed Sidrona. When the randomizer landed on Sidrona, before a picture loaded I just assumed that was the name of a planet. Because it certainly sounds like the name of a planet. But instead, Sidrona is a character of unknown species who just happened to be the Supreme Chancellor of the Galaxy.
He also looked like Cthulhu’s long lost cousin.
Sadly for Sidrona, the power of being the Supreme Chancellor was no match for the power of the Dark Side, and he was killed by Sith Lord Exar Kun in 3996 BBY.
News From the HoloNet
Star Wars in Ojibwe: Discover Anishinaabe Culture at the DIA
For anyone in Metro Detroit, the Detroit Institute of Arts is showing A New Hope in Ojibwe this weekend.
One-of-a-kind Star Wars collector’s card surfaces at US Army post exchange
I like that the writer specifies that Mark Hamill did in fact play Luke Skywalker.
Bryce Dallas Howard Confirms She’s Directing ‘Ahsoka’ Season 2, Hypes Up Series
Guys, I’m already going to watch Ahsoka season 2. You don’t have to keep selling me.
Disney Confirms ‘Wednesday’ Actress in ‘Star Wars’ Saga, Fans Fear the Worst
The photo the story uses makes you think Jenna Ortega is joining The Mandalorian in some capacity. The truth is Emma Meyers, who played Enid Sinclair in Wednesday, is doing a voice in Visions. There are no examples of “fans fearing the worst.” This is the clickiest of clickbait. Please do not click this link.
That’s it for this week. If you like what I’m doing, please subscribe. I’ll catch you next week, and may the Force be with you.
I loved the meme from last week. This week, not so much. I will admit that it made me laugh from the sheer offensiveness of it, but I immediately felt ashamed of myself. I know that the scene referenced is in a space fantasy, but it's still rather inappropriate to say the least. Sadly, there are people out there who hate kids and want them to die or, at least, make them go away. This is no laughing matter. I don't mean to bring down the mood, but I felt like I had to say that.
All negativity aside, this is an otherwise fun and entertaining post to read, as usual. The rant against AI is spot-on and I didn't know about the "clankers" term being used. The thing is, though, will we still be using that word when AI starts taking bodily form and looks like Sean Young, Daryl Hannah, Ryan Gosling, and Rutger Hauer? 😉 Maybe we'll call them "skin jobs" by then. Ok, I will stop.