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People who blindly copy and paste the output of AI systems to their peers are 'meat puppets'.
Niklas Gruhn introduces the term 'meat puppet' to describe people who uncritically relay AI-generated content without engaging with it. ✦ AI generated
Niklas Gruhn · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-08-03 · original ↗
Niklas Gruhn coins an excellent new term - meat puppet - for people who blindly copy and paste the output of AI systems to their peers.
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- ·Niklas Gruhn coins the term 'meat puppet'.
- ·Describes people who blindly copy AI output.
- ·Copied content is passed to peers uncritically.
- ·No engagement with the AI-generated content.
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extends → It's not just that AI is getting smarter — humans are getting dumber too, because relying on AI to explain papers and do the thinking makes people lazy about actually understanding things themselves.Thomas Ahle · Machine Learning Street Talkgives example → At a company that ranks employees on an AI-usage leaderboard, an engineer secretly checked out a parallel copy of the Go repository and had an AI rewrite the entire codebase in Zig on the side, purely to generate visible AI-usage metrics and protect their job.anonymous engineer · Simon Willison's Weblog