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Last year, netizens coined a new term to reflect our growing disdain for AI bots slowly usurping our human agency.
The word “clanker” — later described as a “derogatory slur” by Google’s AI Overview — set the stage for growing disillusionment and anger aimed at tech that’s cluttering our minds and feeds, while driving us crazy at work.
And now we have the perfect accompanying pejorative to describe certain coworkers who are getting a little too carried away, blindly copy-pasting the output of AI chatbots — or slop, in today’s vernacular — without any form of revision or editing.
That term is “meat proxies,” and we have a good feeling it’s going to catch on.
The slang expression perfectly encompasses ongoing concerns over willingness to give over critical thinking skills to the machine, a phenomenon researchers have dubbed “cognitive offloading” or “cognitive surrender.” It’s a particularly serious predicament for students, who are struggling to participate in class discussions, complete their homework, or even learn how to read long texts.
Developer Niklas Gruhn, who’s widely credited for coining the term “meat proxy,” spoke to the frustration an increasing proportion of white collar workers are facing in a blog post earlier this month. He pleaded for people to stop regurgitating the “giant response” of a chatbot “verbatim.”
“Please don’t do this,” he wrote. “I mean, I’ve done this. But I’ve been on the receiving end too many times now. This is not adding value.”
“I can talk to Claude myself,” Gruhn added. “It’s going to be faster and I get to control the context. I don’t need a meat proxy in between.”
Instead of brainlessly copying slop, the developer advised people to “read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words.”
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