Are you a meat proxy? The latest AI slang, explained.

There is a new name for the coworker who responds to a simple question with seven paragraphs that very clearly came straight from ChatGPT : a "meat proxy." You probably know the type.

They paste a question into an AI chatbot , copy the answer into Slack , and consider their work complete.

The response may be long, polished, and packed with suspiciously corporate phrases, but it contains very little evidence that the person sending it has actually read it.

Now (thanks to one software engineer), we finally have a term for that.

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The term appears to have been coined, or at least popularized, by German software engineer Niklas Gruhn, who laid out the phenomenon in an Aug.

3 blog post .

Gruhn said it kept happening everywhere: He would ask a question in Slack, leave feedback on a code review, or argue with friends in a group chat, and someone would return with, "Claude said: [giant response verbatim]." The problem was not simply that the answer came from AI; it was that the person sending it had apparently contributed nothing beyond a few copy-and-paste commands.

Meanwhile, Gruhn still had to wade through a response that could be verbose, filled with jargon, and confidently wrong.

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As an example, he shared one particularly impenetrable sentence Claude had given him about "NATS control-plane events" and "R3 quorum re-form." Gruhn said he had to look up nearly every word just to understand what it was trying to say.

His proposed rule was simple: Use AI all you want, but "read it, understand it, and validate it" before responding in your own words.