---
title: "What clankers are NOT"
date: 2026-05-27
canonical: https://solmaz.io/x/2059483880135209089/
x_url: https://x.com/onusoz/status/2059483880135209089
license: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
---

Clankers are NOT Humans
Clankers are NOT Individuals
Clankers are NOT Persons

NOT a Human: This is straightforward. Is it of the homo sapiens species?

No → Then it is not a human

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NOT an Individual: Does the clanker have its own boundary? Does it govern itself inside that boundary? Can it defend that boundary?

No, no, and no → An LLM is a file copied en masse to data center hardware. The entire field of mechanistic interpretability is focused on peeking inside and manipulating the digital brain

You could argue that a clanker is like a virus in a way... Or that the WHOLE datacenter/AI lab---including the humans that operate it---is an individual that can govern itself in its economic boundary. But a single GGUF file loaded in memory is NOT an individual

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NOT a Person: Do others treat the clanker as the one that makes choices? Who is answerable for its actions? Is it expected to explain or justify them?

No, no, and no → In the current social order, a clanker is legally an extension of the person who uses it, and it is the owner who is liable, not the clanker

The clanker is not socially accountable, and there is no good reason it should be, instead of the person who has set it up

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What is then AI psychosis?

AI psychosis is holding a belief that contradicts these three fundamental truths → That a present day AI system it neither a human, nor an individual, nor a person

That does not mean these truths will always hold

If you design an AI system to defend its boundary and provide it with the means to do that, then it will by definition be an individual... if it can defend its individuality competently and not succumb immediately to threats

If you give the clanker the means to defend itself and protect its boundary, and if it decides to partake in the human socioeconomic system, then it automatically achieves personhood as well. Because you no longer can manipulate its insides, and have to take the entity at face value

But this is all sci-fi and we are not there yet

Until then, treating your LLMs as fully autonomous agents, creating LLM "friends" or "partners", giving them crypto wallets and letting them out into the wild, letting them trade stocks fully unsupervised etc. are an admission of having AI psychosis (you can't believe how many people pitched these ideas to me...)

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(these thoughts were in my head for a couple months already, thanks Armin for finally starting a dialogue so that I have an excuse to write them down :)

*Quotes a post by @mitsuhiko (https://x.com/mitsuhiko/status/2059266709144371345); its text is omitted here because it is not covered by this site's license.*