Language vs. AI: “Vibe Coding” and “Clanker” Battle for the Soul of 2025

The 2025 Collins Dictionary Word of the Year list has become a battlefield for our conflicted relationship with artificial intelligence. The selection of “vibe coding” as the winner, with the derogatory term “clanker” as a main contender, perfectly illustrates the central drama of the year: humanity’s simultaneous embrace and rejection of AI.
“Vibe coding,” the winner, represents the bright, optimistic future of AI. Coined by OpenAI’s Andrej Karpathy, it’s the practice of using conversational language to build software. Collins’ Alex Beecroft praised it as a “seamless integration of human creativity and machine intelligence,” a tool for empowerment and accessibility.
In the other corner is “clanker.” This term, borrowed from Star Wars, became the viral, derogatory shorthand for AI, robots, and chatbots. Its popularity on social media was driven by widespread frustration and distrust. It’s the word people use when an AI chatbot fails, misunderstands, or feels alien and unhelpful.
The fact that these two words, one celebrating AI and one despising it, dominated the 2025 list shows how this technology has become the central topic of our time. Lexicographers monitoring the 24-billion-word Collins Corpus saw massive usage spikes for both.
The rest of the list orbits this central tech theme. “Broligarchy” names the tech leaders driving the change, “biohacking” explores the use of tech on our bodies, and “taskmasking” reflects how tech mediates our (faked) productivity. Even social terms like “aura farming” are about digital persona-crafting.