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

“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 when it came to making editorial decisions about my own writing. But as the models got better, I couldn’t help but be tempted to feed them something—a draft LinkedIn post, an email I needed to send to a coworker, or even a text to a friend about a sensitive matter—to see what AI had to say. What I found was that AI can be genuinely helpful. It was nice to have another pair of eyes read through what I had drafted before sending it out, comforting even. And that was how I found myself two weeks ago copying and pasting my draft texts to friends and family into ChatGPT to get its read before I sent them out. That was my “Oh crap, am I a meat proxy now?” moment. After which I frantically texted my friend, “I don’t want to be a meat proxy, Stefan.” Why people become meat proxies Meat proxies aren’t necessarily lazy. They may value speed for tasks they genuinely do not care about but have to complete. They might be someone who has to write a paper for school, gives AI the prompt and the readings, then copies and pastes the output and submits it on Canvas. They could be someone who asks AI a question and assumes that everything returned to them is true, no fact-checking necessary. That cavalier attitude explains how we end up with the AI faux pas of prompt instructions or ChatGPT responses accidentally included in submitted essays and emails. Or, they may be afraid of getting something wrong and find it easier to trust AI than go through the painstaking process of learning, producing, and trusting their own work. Fear can numb our thinking, and AI is trained on more data than any one human could ever learn. It presents everything with such confidence that it’s easy to doubt ourselves in the face of such authority. Sometimes, the fear of being wrong outweighs the terror of offloading our thinking to someone or something else. There’s another reason we may be so willing to trust AI. It feels human. We’ve given it names, voices, and personalities, and designed it to have conversations with us. There’s evidence that anthropomorphizing AI can make us more likely to trust it. And I can see why. At work, I don’t feel like I’m consulting a piece of software anymore. Instead, AI feels like a ramping-up buddy, so of course I’ll sometimes accidentally defer to its judgment. How to use AI with agency Many companies around the world are adopting AI to generate more revenue, and their employees are expected to use these solutions to be more productive. AI has allowed social media managers to keep tabs on the latest trends around the clock, enabled analysts to do their jobs faster, and, in a way, given all of us personal assistants. This is why the discussion is not as black and white as, did you use AI, or even, did you delegate work to AI? Of course you did, and more than ever, you’re expected to, or you’ll never get through your mountain of work. Whether we like it or not, AI is embedded in our workflows. The question isn’t whether or not to use AI; it’s how to use it without becoming a meat proxy. The deciding factor of whether we have crossed into meat proxy territory is whether we are still exercising human judgment. Even when AI has summarized information or done analysis for you, are you the one making the decision about what to do with that, or have you delegated that most important step to AI, too? To use AI with human agency, approach each session by doing your own preparation first. That could be having a hypothesis about the answer you are hoping to get from AI about a problem, or it could be developing a point of view outside of AI tools so you are ready to push back at AI’s initial output, which should almost never be taken as final. Once you arrive at an output resulting from a bit of back and forth with AI, learn to sit with it. Take the time to read the output in its entirety. Ask yourself whether what you just read makes sense, whether it’s clear, and increasingly important, whether it sounds like you. Use human judgment with AI but reserve judgment of other humans It’s tempting to judge people who have delegated judgment to AI, but when companies invest in AI expecting higher productivity, that expectation can easily push employees to trust AI rather than themselves. The expectation to work much faster while retaining human judgment is almost contradictory by its nature, which explains why some people become meat proxies, not by choice, but due to pressure. This becomes a new question we as professionals must grapple with: what we are delegating to AI and whether we are retaining ultimate judgment. I’d argue that anyone actively thinking about this is unlikely to be or become a meat proxy. As for those of us quick to judge and label a person a meat proxy, we should probably exercise some restraint and human judgment of our own. Just because someone used AI does not mean they delegated their thinking to it, and just because the final output is bad does not mean AI was responsible for it. Sometimes, we as humans are responsible for the very bad output. Calling someone a meat proxy doesn’t address the problem, and it doesn’t provide any feedback on how to do better besides not relying on AI, which is unrealistic. After reading this, if you think it was bad, just know I wrote it myself and take full responsibility for it. When it comes to writing opinion pieces, my philosophy is to always write them myself without any use of AI because I want the opinions to be truly mine. So you can dislike this piece, but please don’t call me a meat proxy.