Clanker Guide
The line that reads like a machine is talking.
Where the word comes from: clanker is the word organic people use for the robots - in Star Wars it is the carbon-based contempt you show a droid. Gen Alpha borrowed it for anything that talks like a machine: the over-polite, over-cautious, stack-of-qualifiers line that says a lot and means nothing, because that is exactly how the language models were trained to talk.
What clanker-speak sounds like: it is not the words that give it away, it is the texture. The sentence has three hedges, a "great question," a "it is important to note," and it ends on a disclaimer. A person says "that is messed up." A clanker says "I understand why that might feel difficult, and it is completely valid to have that reaction, while also considering the broader context."
The game: the clanker game drops a chat thread or a review and asks you to point the one line that reads like a robot wrote it. The other lines sound human - short, a little mean, specific. The clanker line is the one that is too smooth, too balanced, and too careful to be anyone's actual voice.