Alex Reisner

I’m a writer, programmer, and tech investigator working to improve our public discussion about the statistical models known as AI. Since 2023, I’ve broken major stories about the exploitative practices behind the training of AI models, and created online tools to help authors, screenwriters, and YouTubers discover how their work is being secretly taken and used. I’m currently a staff writer at The Atlantic, where I founded the AI Watchdog project. My work has also been published in Harper’s, Wired, and Proof News.

For tips and general inquiries, please use [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.

Selected Articles

  • “AI’s Memorization Crisis”: AI doesn’t “learn” like a human, it makes copies of its training data, sometimes even entire books. 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 that receives donations from AI companies has been scraping millions of paywalled articles and lying to publishers about it. (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)
  • “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)
  • “YouTube’s Sneaky AI ‘Experiment’”: YouTube is adding subtle visual effects to make normal videos appear AI-generated. Why? (August 2025, The Atlantic)