Columnist

Are you a meat proxy?

Meat Proxy: Someone who is asked a question, forwards it directly to AI, and gives the AI response back to the requester.

Just raw AI straight from the tap – no editing, nor perspective added.

It is a growing trend.

If you’ve been on the receiving end of this, the experience is this: Urgh – I could have done that myself.

As usually, you’ve reached out because you value their perspective.

It’s even worse when someone reaches out for your perspective, and then they use AI to analyse and respond without adding their own thoughts, and they then send you unfiltered AI questions.

Because AI is good at asking asinine ‘searching questions’, it will do this forever in a loop.

It creates a feeling that someone is happy to use AI to consume your time in a discardable way – and time is the most precious resource we have.

The natural outcome of doing that is to extirpate trust.

And besides, people who do this are indirectly communicating that they have no value; they are communicating that they are a Claude subscription with extra steps.

People must use AI to empower; they must edit, they must fact-check, they must layer in their expertise and thought.

The beauty here is, AI doesn’t have our experience, your knowledge, capabilities, your expertise.

It doesn’t have our stories, our empathy – our emotion. It cannot attend an event and have a genuinely meaningful conversation with another person.

This is the human advantage – and it’s curious to see people give this up so freely.

There are a set of things in which AI cannot yet out-value people, and some people are so willing to hand off those sacred duties.

They’re sacred because trust is sacred, because they are requests from other people who have put their trust in us to leverage our experience, when they could have asked Claude themselves.

Proxying is the illusion of productivity. It might appear productive in the moment to save a few minutes, but it’s not productive at a macro level if the receiving person loses confidence in that relationship, and if you genuinely value the relationship.

My view here is simple: People must not be meat proxies in relationships they want to keep.

What I love to see is balance.

I love it when people have clearly used AI to do broad and deep research, and they have given it their own theory and chain of thought. They started with their own perspective. They have worked with AI to draft a response, but they then edit further and really make sure they are confident in the response before sending it.

I do this by transcribing my thoughts. I will read the request, mull it over, and then I will use Wispr to transcribe a monologue of my thinking – pure unstructured thought, it’s messy, it’s minutes of talking.

What do I think? What would I do? What questions would I have? What don’t I know? What do I want AI to research? What situations have we seen before which looked like this, and what happened? If this requires vision or strategy, what would I do, and how would I steer it?

I also have a growing knowledge base of my thoughts, our experiences, past projects and all the other good things that can be searched by AI to help answer the question – imagine a journal for business.

Then, I have AI go away and research this, challenge it, answer my questions, draft it up, and then I will edit the response, or monologue again if I don’t like what I am reading and I need to steer more.

The critical thing here, though, is that AI drafts a response with the primary source being my transcript, my ideas, my knowledge bank, expertise, experience and capabilities.

It’s the secret sauce that you have, that everyone else with just a Claude subscription does not have.

So, don’t get me wrong – I am front of the queue in the AI fanboy club, we even run regular AI events for B2B service businesses – it’s genuinely revolutionising what we and our clients do, but my perspective is this.

AI can be very good at a lot of things you train it to do, but it should not replace human-to-human interactions that are inherently built on trust.

Mark Renny is co-founder and managing director of Newcastle-headquartered digital agency and software development company Wubbleyou

Want your business, product or service to be seen regionally and nationally? Bdaily helps you get your story in front of the right audience, every day. Find out how Bdaily can help →

Join more than 55,000 subscribers by signing up to our daily bulletin each morning here.