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

[Emily Gordon]

And a “meat suit” is a human body in early internet (perhaps earlier?)
parlance; “meatspace” is messy real life in a meatsuit in 3D, as opposed to
cyberspace.

On Tue, Aug 25, 2026 at 9:24 PM ADSGarson O'Toole <
00001aa1be50b751-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:

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

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