GoKawiilIt’s increasingly common: You ask a co-worker, associate or buddy a complex question, and they copy and paste an AI-generated response from a chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude, without adding any human input. The internet world now has a name for that sort of person: meat proxy.
The term “meat proxy” seems to have originated in a brief Aug. 3 blog post by developer Niklas Guhn, who complained that he was receiving responses on Slack and other work channels as verbatim output from AI chatbots.
“This is not adding value,” he wrote. “I can talk to Claude myself. It’s going to be faster and I get to control the context. I don’t need a meat proxy in between.”
Social media immediately seized the phrase, with one viral X post declaring, “Babe, wake up, new term just dropped.”
The masses broadened the definition to mean, “A person who forwards AI-generated text, code or other output without reading, understanding or validating it. The person acts only as a relay between the AI system and the intended recipient.” The human is merely the “meat,” acting as an intermediary (proxy) for the machine. Makes perfect sense.
Referring to humans as “meat computers” has also been a growing trend among tech executives — except in this case, it’s about emphasizing the perceived superiority of AI over biological brains. A New York Times article from May noted how that grim vernacular pits humans against machines, portraying people as inefficient, energy-consuming hardware compared to advanced digital superintelligence.
I’ve reached out to linguists and analysts for their opinions on this trend, but in the meantime, it’s easy to see why new slang like “AI slop” and “meat proxy” have resonated. Besides the fact that large language models often get things wrong and produce crappy output, chatbot responses can feel generic, repetitive and lacking effort, especially when they’re flooding spaces that once relied on expertise or authenticity.
Sure, Claude can write emails for you, but without input, that’s dangerous. Anthropic/Screenshot by Blake Stimac
Why being a meat proxy is a problem, in or out of the workplace
Guhn’s issue with meat proxies points to broader concerns about how AI-generated stand-ins dilute human opinions and skills.
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