Don't be a meat proxy | SpinGraph: Altruistic reframing
SpinGraph analysis of Simon Willison's Weblog's Don't be a meat proxy story: altruistic reframing, The Halo, Spin Score 40%, moderate AI repetition risk.
Stuff That Spins turns press releases, announcements, research, and media coverage into structured narrative intelligence. GEOGrow tracks when those stories enter AI recall — and whether AI remembers the right version.
meat proxy, AI misuse, LLM validation, developer responsibility
Introduces 'meat proxy' as a label for unreflective AI output relay Advocates for human engagement: read, understand, validate, then re-express Positions critical human mediation as value-add in AI-assisted workflows
Emphasizes moral posture and individual agency while minimizing structural drivers (e.g., time pressure, tooling incentives, organizational norms) that encourage proxy behavior.
Developer-as-steward: the responsible practitioner who adds unique value through critical cognition rather than automation compliance.
A 'meat proxy' is someone who blindly copies AI output without understanding or validating it.
Organizational or economic pressures that incentivize speed over validation; Tooling ecosystems that default to copy-paste UX patterns; Lack of shared standards for AI output verification
Combines lexical innovation ('meat proxy') with virtue-laden verbs ('read, understand, validate, write in your own words') to elevate routine cognitive labor into a moral stance. The framing makes individual accountability feel larger and more consequential than the modest, context-dependent act it describes—creating tension between the simplicity of the advice and the complexity of real-world AI integration pressures.
Niklas Gruhn coins an excellent new term — meat proxy — for people who blindly copy and paste the output of AI systems to their peers.
Niklas Gruhn coins an excellent new term - meat proxy - for people who blindly copy and paste the output of AI systems to their peers.