Reisner named staff writer at The Atlantic

Alex Reisner, who covers technology and artificial intelligence, has been named a staff writer at The Atlantic.

In an announcement, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:

We’re all familiar with Alex’s many talents: He is the mastermind behind our AI Watchdog project, which launched earlier this month, and his work as the foremost investigator of the hidden data that goes into training AI models has distinguished him as one of the most creative chroniclers of the ChatGPT era. Those of us who have already worked closely with Alex have come to know him as dogged, scrupulous, and inventive. His background includes extensive work in programming, baseball podcasting, and, for good measure, drumming in Francis and the Lights. Alex’s first work for The Atlantic, in 2023, became a major scoop about the more than 190,000 pirated books used to train prominent generative AI systems. (Margaret Atwood and Stephen King both responded to that story in our  pages.) Alex joined us as a contributing writer earlier this year. His move to staff writer will allow him to expand his groundbreaking work even further.