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 se…