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.”
“Making that effort is value you can add,” Gruhn argued.
The new term appears to hit a nerve, particularly among developers, who’ve seen the industry upended by the advent of powerful AI-powered coding software.
“I already use that term for middle management,” one X user joked.
“I think everyone knows at least one Meat proxy in their company,” another wrote.
“This is the biggest career risk of 2026,” developer Cory House tweeted. “I’m seeing this problem first hand.”
“There’s a very fine line between using AI to be more productive and being a meat proxy,” tech founder Nicholas Charriere added. “Don’t be a meat proxy.”
Months before Gruhn coined the latest term, author and noted AI critic Cory Doctorow published a book about effectively the same phenomenon. In his “Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI,” Doctorow used the term “reverse centaur” to describe a metaphorical human being with a horse’s head — instead of the other way around — who mindlessly assists the machine.
“In automation theory, a ‘centaur’ is a person who is assisted by a machine,” he wrote in the book. “You’re a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.”
“And obviously, a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine,” he added.
But Doctorow didn’t rule out a more optimistic vision of the future where humans can regain control over their own agency.
“There is one thing SF writers know that the AI bosses who are gunning for generational dynastic wealth by transforming us all into AI-lashed reverse centaurs do not know, and that they absolutely don’t want you to know,” he wrote. “That thing is this: the future is up for grabs. It is not inevitable. AI isn’t a genie that can’t be put back into a bottle.”
More on cognitive offloading: Concern Grows That AI Is Damaging Users’ Cognitive Abilities
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