Alex Reisner

I'm a writer 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 use of pirated books and YouTube videos to train AI models, and created online tools to help creators and publishers discover how their work is being secretly taken and used. I've also written about chatbot hacking, memorization in LLMs, and the ongoing copyright lawsuits. 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]). My GPG public key is: 8BD4 CA2B C284 0967 A495 88D6 B570 C5A2 15F2 A6E4.

Selected Articles

  • "Common Crawl Is Doing the AI Industry's Dirty Work": A little-known non-profit 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 YouTube creators. Article includes a dataset search tool. (September 2025, The Atlantic)
  • "The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem": Meta employees thought about licensing books to train their LLMs but decided it would take too long. They decided to steal them instead. Mark Zuckerberg gave them the green light. 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 192,000 pirated books has been used by Meta, Bloomberg, and other AI companies 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)