[Ads-l] WOTY watch: "meat proxy"

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

This use of "meat" was probably influenced by a phrase attributed to
AI pioneer Marvin Minsky:

Quote Origin: The Brain Is Merely a Meat Machine
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/05/06/machines/

Garson

On Tue, Aug 25, 2026 at 11:26 PM Ben Zimmer
<00001aae0710f4b7-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:
>
> Via "sf-isms: the lexicon of San Francisco tech slang":
>
> ---
> https://sfisms.org/meat-proxy
>
> Meat proxy
>
> 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.
>
> "Please summarize what Claude found instead of making me review a wall of
> text from a meat proxy."
>
> Origin
> The earliest matching use located was an anonymous March 31, 2026 blog post
> titled "meat-based llm proxies." It described people who feed messages to
> an LLM and copy its responses back to others, saying that the recipient was
> effectively communicating with the model "via a meat proxy."
>
> Niklas Gruhn popularized the shorter label with his August 3, 2026 essay
> "Don't be a meat proxy," focused on unread Claude output in Slack, pull
> requests, and group chats. Simon Willison amplified it the same day, and
> Gruhn's post subsequently reached the Hacker News front page with more than
> 1,800 points and 700 comments. The phrase then spread widely on X,
> including a viral post by Josh tried coding that received roughly 4,000
> likes and 490,000 views.
> ---
>
> --bgz
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org