--- description: How AI is absolutely never used here. layout: layouts/base.njk title: Nathan Upchurch | AI structuredData: none ---

AI: Stop the Slop

Certified generative AI hater here. This website and all content herein is 100% guaranteed AI slop free: code, prose images, music, et cetera. [![Michael Scott from the US version of The Office shaking his head and saying Hmm, nope; don't like that.](/img/the-office-no.gif "#StopTheSlop")](/img/the-office-no.gif) It's being used as [an excuse to put people out of work](https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2026/08/12/ai-and-layoffs-how-a-lazy-excuse-costs-companies/) even though [it can't do the job](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/30/ai-backfired-so-ford-had-to-rehire-humans-greybeard-engineers), it was trained on human work before the humans had any chance to weigh in on whether they wanted their work used this way, causes [major problems](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2527761-flood-of-ai-garbage-is-pushing-open-source-developers-to-the-limit/) for free and open source software projects, it comes at [a huge environmental cost](https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117) while we're *already* [careering towards climate catastrophe](https://kottke.org/26/08/an-absolute-climate-catastrophe), and [AI datacenters are destroying communities](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-8TDOFqkQA). On top of all that, it causes [cognitive decline](https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872) and [AI psychosis](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/202507/the-emerging-problem-of-ai-psychosis) in users, [it lies](https://futurism.com/study-ai-search-wrong), its output often sucks [in a million subtle ways](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212473X26000520) only noticeable if you are already competent enough at the task to not need to use AI in the first place, and as a result, it's really just not very useful at all for most people—even if they think it is. ## AI Permissions I do my utmost to ensure that my work is not hoovered wholesale and regurgitated by AI products by including an [ai.txt file](/ai.txt) and disallowing known crawlers in my [robots.txt file](/robots.txt), but just in case it will ever become meaningful in any legal sense, I'd like to make it clear here that I do not grant permission for any content on this website to be used as training data for any AI project, or for any portion of this website to be scraped by bots associated with AI projects.