How to avoid being a ‘meat proxy’ when you use AI

AI can make us faster, but there’s a line between using it as a thought partner and completely surrendering our judgment.

[Photo: Thai Liang Lim/Getty Images]

“Meat proxy” is the worst insult you can hurl at me right now. The term, popularized in August 2026 by the software engineer Niklas Gruhn, refers to a person who takes what artificial intelligence generates and passes it on to another person without reading or even thinking about the output first. As someone who takes pride in my independent thinking, that is the biggest insult I could imagine receiving, if people thought I was operating under AI’s instructions.

It’s easy to look down on people who copy and paste AI-generated text, code, or images. We have a name for this stuff: AI slop. As a society, we snicker at the people putting out AI slop—“They’re so lazy, but they’re not fooling anyone.” For a long time, I thought I’d never rely on AI to think, especially........

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