https://www.alexreisner.com I’m an Atlantic staff writer and tech investigator working to improve our public discussion about the statistical models known as AI. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/ai-music-generators-suno-google-udio/687485/ AI developers are using millions of pirated songs to train products that can generate songs that are clear rip-offs of songs they were trained on. Article includes a dataset search tool and samples of similar songs. Sun, 14 Jun 2026 11:00:00 +0000 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/04/4chan-ai-dungeon-thinking-reasoning/686794/ AI companies claim their chatbots can reason about problems, but the industry is just exploiting a trick that was invented by gamers on 4chan in 2020. Tue, 14 Apr 2026 15:38:00 +0000 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/03/hypocrisy-ai-industry/686477/ Tech companies believe in intellectual property, but not yours. Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:50:10 +0000 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/12/neurips-ai-bubble-agi/685250/ Sun, 14 Dec 2025 12:00:00 +0000 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/ai-memorization-research/685552/ 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. Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:35:54 +0000 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/common-crawl-ai-training-data/684567/ A little-known non-profit has been scraping millions of paywalled articles, lying to publishers about it, and taking donations from AI companies. Tue, 04 Nov 2025 12:00:00 +0000 https://harpers.org/archive/2025/07/forbidden-outputs-alex-reisner-grok-ai-bias/ 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. Tue, 01 Jul 2025 12:00:00 +0000 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/09/youtube-ai-training-data-sets/684116/ 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. Wed, 10 Sep 2025 14:59:00 +0000 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/08/youtube-shorts-ai-upscaling/683946/ YouTube is adding subtle visual effects to make normal videos appear AI-generated. Why? Fri, 22 Aug 2025 18:37:36 +0000 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/07/anthropic-meta-ai-rulings/683526/ Two recent rulings in copyright infringement lawsuits make conflicting statements about how the technology works and what it means for creators. Mon, 14 Jul 2025 17:19:56 +0000 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libgen-meta-openai/682093/ 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. Thu, 20 Mar 2025 11:30:00 +0000 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/11/opensubtitles-ai-data-set/680650/ 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. Mon, 18 Nov 2024 11:30:00 +0000 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/08/books3-ai-meta-llama-pirated-books/675063/ This first-of-its-kind investigation reveals that pirated books are being used to train LLMs. Sat, 19 Aug 2023 21:04:56 +0000