Why Would Meta Download So Much Porn?
Filings from a recent lawsuit allege that the tech company accessed—and distributed—copyrighted adult films, blueprints for 3-D-printable handguns, celebrity deepfakes, and more.
AI Watchdog
The Atlantic’s ongoing investigation of the books, videos, and other media used by the world’s most powerful tech companies to train their AI models.
Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project
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The Millions of Songs Mashed Into AI-Generated Music
Explore the astonishing amount of music available to AI developers.
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The Strange Origin of AI’s ‘Reasoning’ Abilities
It involves 4chan, of all places.
Someone Is Mysteriously Snapping Up Used Books Around the World
Are AI companies to blame?
The Company Quietly Funneling Paywalled Articles to AI Developers
“You shouldn’t have put your content on the internet if you didn’t want it to be on the internet,” Common Crawl’s executive director says.
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Search Millions of YouTube Videos Used to Train Generative AI
Inside the data sets training new video-creating tools
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These 183,000 Books Are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech
Use our new search tool to see which authors have been used to train the machines.
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AI’s Memorization Crisis
Large language models don’t “learn”—they copy. And that could change everything for the tech industry.
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Atlantic Intelligence
Atlantic writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age.
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Generative AI Is Challenging a 234-Year-Old Law
The technology might finally bend copyright past the breaking point, upending what it means to have a creative society in the process.
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The Flaw That Could Ruin Generative AI
A technical problem known as “memorization” is at the heart of recent lawsuits that pose a significant threat to generative-AI companies.
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What I Found in a Database Meta Uses to Train Generative AI
Nobel-winning authors, Dungeons and Dragons, Christian literature, and erotica all serve as datapoints for the machine.
These 183,000 Books Are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech
Use our new search tool to see which authors have been used to train the machines.