In the television show “Battlestar Galactica,” they were called toasters. In the film “Blade Runner,” skinjobs. Now in the culture war against robots and artificial intelligence chatbots, a new slur has emerged.

“Clanker.”

“Get this dirty clanker out of here!” yelled a man in a recent viral video while pointing at a robot on a sidewalk. “Bucket of bolts.”

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.

“It’s still early, but people are really beginning to see the negative impacts of this stuff,” said Sam Kirchner, who organized an anti-A.I. protest this month outside the San Francisco office of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Mr. Kirchner said he was happy to see clanker become popular slang, though, for him, it didn’t go far enough.