Alex Reisner

I’m a tech investigator working to improve our public discussion about the statistical models known as AI. I’m currently a staff writer at The Atlantic, where I founded the AI Watchdog project.

Since 2023, I’ve broken stories about the tech industry’s mass theft of books, music, videos, movie dialog, and news articles, and created tools to help people see how their work is being secretly downloaded and exploited. I’ve also written about the memorization of training data and the disastrously poor engineering behind generative AI. My work has also been published in Harper’s, Wired, and Proof News.

Selected Articles

“Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster”: Data centers are proliferating and there's a worldwide shortage of computer memory. It's all because generative AI is a poorly engineered technology. In the industry's own jargon, it does not scale. (July 2026, The Atlantic)
“The Millions of Songs Mashed Into AI-Generated Music”: AI developers are pirating millions of songs to train products that can generate rip-offs of those songs. (Article includes a dataset search tool and samples of similar songs.) (June 2026, The Atlantic)
“How 4chan Gamers Accidentally Invented AI ‘Reasoning’”: AI companies claim their chatbots can reason about problems, but the industry is just copying a trick that was invented by gamers on 4chan in 2020. (April 2026, The Atlantic)
“AI’s Memorization Crisis”: AI doesn’t “learn” like a human, it makes copies of its training data, and uses those copies in its outputs. My investigation presents crucial research that the AI industry has been trying to keep hidden. (January 2026, The Atlantic)
“Common Crawl Is Doing the AI Industry’s Dirty Work”: A little-known non-profit has been scraping millions of paywalled articles, lying to publishers about it, and taking donations from AI companies. (November 2025, The Atlantic)
“Forbidden Outputs”: Chatbots are increasingly used to control what information we can access. In February 2025, xAI employees instructed the company’s chatbot to ignore web pages that claim Elon Musk or Donald Trump spread misinformation. (July 2025, Harper’s)
“AI Is Coming for YouTube Creators”: AI companies including Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, Runway, ByteDance, Snap, and Tencent have downloaded millions of videos from YouTube to train video-generating products that compete with YouTubers. (Article includes a dataset search tool.) (September 2025, The Atlantic)
“The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem”: Meta employees considered licensing books to train their LLMs but decided it would take too long. Mark Zuckerberg gave the green light to steal them instead. (Article includes a dataset search tool.) (March 2025, The Atlantic)
“There’s No Longer Any Doubt That Hollywood Writing Is Powering AI”: Dialogue from movies and TV shows has been used by companies such as Apple and Anthropic to train AI systems. (Article includes a dataset search tool.) (November 2024, The Atlantic)
“Revealed: The Authors Whose Pirated Books Are Powering Generative AI”: This first-of-its-kind investigation reveals that pirated books are being used to train LLMs. (August 2023, The Atlantic)

Contact

For tips and general inquiries, email [email protected]. Whistleblowers: I take your safety and courage seriously. Anonymous contact via Signal (@AlexReisner.11) or encrypted email ([email protected]). Public key: 8BD4 CA2B C284 0967 A495 88D6 B570 C5A2 15F2 A6E4. You can also send me a message or file anonymously through this form.