Damon Beres
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Damon Beres
@damonberes.com
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Senior editor at The Atlantic, focused on tech //

SIGNAL: Damon.63
📨 dberes at the atlantic dot com
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On September 12, Jay Edelson received what he expected to be a standard legal document. Edelson is a lawyer representing the parents of Adam Raine; they are suing OpenAI, alleging that their 16-year-old son took his life at the encouragement of ChatGPT. OpenAI’s lawyers had some inquiries for the opposing counsel, which is normal. For instance, they requested information about therapy Raine may have received, and Edelson complied. But some of the asks began to feel invasive, he told me. OpenAI wanted the family to send any videos taken at memorial services for Raine, according to documents I have reviewed. It wanted a list of people who attended or were invited to any memorial services. And it wanted the names of anyone who had cared for or supervised Raine over the past five years, including friends, teachers, school-bus drivers, coaches, and “car pool divers [sic].” “Going after grieving parents, it is despicable,” Edelson told me, and he objected to the requests. OpenAI did not respond to multiple inquiries from me about discovery in the Raine case, nor did Mayer Brown, the law firm representing the company. (OpenAI has announced that it would work on a number of algorithmic and design changes, including the addition of new parental controls, following the Raine lawsuit.) According to Edelson, OpenAI also has not provided any documents in response to his own discovery requests in preparation for trial.
November 11, 2025 at 12:20 AM
damonberes.com
“We can’t police that whole thing,” Common Crawl said. “It’s not our job. We’re just a bunch of dusty bookshelves.”

Meanwhile, CC has accepted hundreds of thousands in donations from AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. And it expressed open antagonism toward the media:
In our conversation, Skrenta downplayed the importance of any particular newspaper or magazine. He told me that The Atlantic is not a crucial part of the internet. “Whatever you’re saying, other people are saying too, on other sites,” he said. Throughout our conversation, Skrenta gave the impression of having little respect for (or understanding of) how original reporting works. Skrenta did, however, express tremendous reverence for Common Crawl’s archive. He sees it as a record of our civilization’s achievements. He told me he wants to “put it on a crystal cube and stick it on the moon,” so that “if the Earth blows up,” aliens might be able to reconstruct our history. “The Economist and The Atlantic will not be on that cube,” he told me. “Your article will not be on that cube. This article.”
November 4, 2025 at 12:22 PM
damonberes.com
Common Crawl says it complies with removal requests—while telling us they are “a pain in the ass”—but also is not actually removing the data in question.
In July 2023, The New York Times sent a notice to Common Crawl asking for the removal of previously scraped Times content. (In their lawsuit against OpenAI, the Times noted that Common Crawl includes “at least 16 million unique records of content” from Times websites.) The nonprofit seemed amenable to the request. In November of that year, a Times spokesperson, Charlie Stadtlander, told Business Insider: “We simply asked that our content be removed, and were pleased that Common Crawl complied.” But as I explored Common Crawl’s archives, I found that many Times articles appear to still be present. When I mentioned this to the Times, Stadtlander told me: “Our understanding from them is that they have deleted the majority of the Times’s content, and continue to work on full removal.” The Danish Rights Alliance (DRA), an organization that represents publishers and other rights-holders in Denmark, told me about a similar interaction with Common Crawl. Thomas Heldrup, the organization’s head of content protection and enforcement, showed me a redacted email exchange with the nonprofit that began in July 2024, in which the DRA requested that its members’ content be removed from the archive. In December 2024, more than six months after the DRA had initially requested removal, Common Crawl’s attorney wrote: “I confirm that Common Crawl has initiated work to remove your members’ content from the data archive. Presently, approximately 50% of this content has been removed.” I spoke with other publishers who’d received similar messages from Common Crawl. One was told, after multiple follow-up emails, that removal was 50 percent, 70 percent, and then 80 percent complete. By writing code to browse the petabytes of data, I was able to see that large quantities of articles from the Times, the DRA, and these other publishers are still present in Common Crawl’s archives. Furthermore, the files are stored in a system that logs the modification times of every file. The foundation adds a new “crawl” to its archive every few weeks, each containing 1 billion to 4 billion webpages, and it has been publishing these regular installments since 2013. None of the content files in Common Crawl’s archives appears to have been modified since 2016, suggesting that no content has been removed in at least nine years. In our first conversation, Skrenta told me that removal requests are “a pain in the ass” but insisted that the foundation complies with them. In our second conversation, Skrenta was more forthcoming. He said that Common Crawl is “making an earnest effort” to remove content but that the file format in which Common Crawl stores its archives is meant “to be immutable. You can’t delete anything from it.” (He did not answer my question about where the 50, 70, and 80 percent removal figures come from.) Yet the nonprofit appears to be concealing this from visitors to its website, where a search function, the only nontechnical tool for seeing what’s in Common Crawl’s archives, returns misleading results for certain domains. A search for nytimes.com in any crawl from 2013 through 2022 shows a “no captures” result, when in fact there are articles from NYTimes.com in most of these crawls. I also discovered more than 1,000 other domains that produce this incorrect “no captures” result for at least several of the crawls, and most of these domains belong to publishers, including the BBC, Reuters, The New Yorker, Wired, the Financial Times, The Washington Post, and, yes, The Atlantic. According to my research and Common Crawl’s own disclosures, the companies behind each of these publications have sent legal requests to the nonprofit. At least one publisher I spoke with told me that it had used this search tool and concluded that its content had been removed from Common Crawl’s archives.
November 4, 2025 at 12:18 PM
damonberes.com
notable
November 2, 2025 at 4:24 PM
damonberes.com
Tonal misunderstanding aside this is actually how the piece ends fwiw
October 31, 2025 at 1:13 PM
damonberes.com
🫣 www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...
Sophie Chumburidze ’29 said the report felt dismissive of students’ hard work and academic struggles. “The whole entire day, I was crying,” she said. “I skipped classes on Monday, and I was just sobbing in bed because I felt like I try so hard in my classes, and my grades aren’t even the best.” “It just felt soul-crushing,” she added.
October 30, 2025 at 4:09 PM
damonberes.com
Misreading of Tolkien aside Elon has also reposted video footage of a man being stabbed to death, which is the sort of thing you just didn't really see on the internet so much before unless you really looked for it, and is now everywhere on X x.com/elonmusk/sta...
October 29, 2025 at 2:32 PM
damonberes.com
October 28, 2025 at 2:04 PM
damonberes.com
yeahhh
October 28, 2025 at 4:12 AM
damonberes.com
And a good parenthetical
I asked the farmer if he had noticed any environmental effects from living next to the data centers. The impact on the water supply, he told me, was negligible. “Honestly, we probably use more water than they do,” he said. (Training a state-of-the-art A.I. requires less water than is used on a square mile of farmland in a year.) Power is a different story: the farmer said that the local utility was set to hike rates for the third time in three years, with the most recent proposed hike being in the double digits. The biggest loss was the nutrient-rich topsoil, which his family had maintained with careful crop rotations. “Microsoft brought in an excavator and ripped it all out in a day!” he said, as if speaking of a lost heirloom. “Six to ten feet of it, all gone.”
October 27, 2025 at 3:48 PM
damonberes.com
This Stephen Witt graf is one of the best on tokens that I've read; just a nice, clear, compact explanation of what's happening here www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
When the finished product is ready, clones of the weights are distributed to data centers around the country, where they can be accessed through the internet, a process known as “inference.” Users ask questions, prompting the A.I. to produce individual units of intelligence called “tokens.” A token might be a small square of pixels or a fragment of a word. To write a college term paper, an A.I. might produce about five thousand tokens, consuming enough electricity to run a microwave oven at full power for about three minutes. As A.I. fields increasingly complex requests—for video, for audio, for therapy—the need for computing power will increase many times over.
October 27, 2025 at 3:48 PM
damonberes.com
here is my Gus
October 27, 2025 at 12:00 AM
damonberes.com
Obviously that last guy was incredible. More of him:
October 23, 2025 at 9:07 PM
damonberes.com
Various farm animals I saw today
October 23, 2025 at 9:05 PM
damonberes.com
tbh though, god bless them, but their fluency with digital technology has always been pretty awful
October 16, 2025 at 11:48 PM
damonberes.com
Kind of wild to me that this is from one of the richest companies in the world (and one based in California)
Earlier this week, I stopped for breakfast in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a largely Hispanic neighborhood where street vendors sell tamales and rice pudding out of orange Gatorade coolers. I speak some Spanish, but I wanted to test out Apple’s new “Live Translation” feature, which has been advertised as a sort of interpreter in your ears. I popped in my AirPods, pulled up the Translate app, and approached. As I opened my mouth, the AirPods blared a message into my ears: AMBIENT SOUND LEVELS ARE HIGH. TRY MOVING iPHONE CLOSER TO THE AUDIO SOURCE TO CONTINUE TRANSLATION. The vendor had already begun explaining her offerings to me in a mix of Spanish and English, but the AirPods drowned out most of her words. I asked a question, in English, about the tamale fillings, then realized that I had to press an on-screen “Play” button for it to be read aloud by my device in Spanish. The vendor smiled (or maybe grimaced) and then responded. After a few seconds of delay, her Spanish was translated into my ears: “Green sauce, slices with cheese, slices with chicken, Molly, juaquillo.” That final word is neither translated nor a word, but I took it to mean guajillo, a kind of chili pepper. Slices seemed to be a misunderstanding of the Spanish word rajas, which does technically mean “slices” but has a regional meaning—as in rajas con crema, or strips of roasted poblano peppers with cream (and in this case, cheese or chicken). The vendor said some other things that were unintelligible because of the overlap between her live speech and the lagging translation. Finally, I assumed that Molly was a bad translation of mole, the sauce, but I didn’t want to risk a morning dose of MDMA in the off chance that Apple was right. I opted for the salsa verde. Another day, I spotted a flower store selling vibrant bouquets and wanted to know what kind of plants were included in an orange display. The proprietor laughed as my AirPods didn’t pick up, and thus could not translate, my own English words, so I just gestured to the flowers, which she called “cempasúchil, o flor de muerto.” Too much ambient sound, my AirPods said, so I lifted the phone closer to her face and asked, in English, if she could repeat herself. When Apple translated what she said, it didn’t actually provide an English word for cempasúchil—instead, it produced sampasúchil, an unusual spelling. I didn’t know what this meant, but the flowers were pretty and I bought them anyway. Later, I Googled the word. (It corrected to cempasúchil, which means “marigolds.”)
October 16, 2025 at 8:42 PM
damonberes.com
One thing you can say for sure: These cars and their wraps look sick as hell www.wired.com/story/owning...
October 16, 2025 at 4:48 PM
damonberes.com
My son wanted a “Spidey” jack-o-lantern and I’m proud enough of my achievement to post it to my public Bluesky please clap
October 11, 2025 at 6:28 PM
damonberes.com
👍🏻
Business Insider headline: "He used Grok's sexy AI bot for 'dirty smut.' Then he fell in love."
October 8, 2025 at 3:08 PM
damonberes.com
Obsessed with this portion of @alibreland.bsky.social’s latest, on “heritage Americans,” not just because it’s snappy, but because it reveals much about the nature of the ideology these people have: superior, unwavering, fundamentally rooted in historic unreality www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
When I called Engel to ask him about all of this, he told me that he does not believe that genetics are “the chief explanation” for how Anglo-Protestant ideals are transferred from generation to generation—but added that “there is an ethnic or racial correlation” between who embodies such ideals and who doesn’t. Our conversation was polite, but strange at times. I mentioned that as a half-Iranian American who was born and raised in the U.S., I share more in common ideologically with the Anglo-Protestant Founders of the United States than I do with Middle Eastern theocrats. “I would also contend that there is something deep inside of you that is attracted to or finds familiar portions of Iranian history,” he said, as though I am genetically predisposed to find the conquests of Darius the Great uniquely moving. I don’t, and told him as much. “I’m not contending that you can’t take someone and raise him within a certain cultural environment and he begins to adopt the taste and all that,” Engel responded. “But I do contend that if you bring in massive groups of people over time, it’s going to, in a few generations, be a lot culturally different than it would otherwise have been if you never had done that.”
October 7, 2025 at 12:55 PM
damonberes.com
Love Letterboxd
September 26, 2025 at 2:12 PM
damonberes.com
The Chinese social credit system is constantly invoked as some unspeakable red line that must never be crossed, yet here is Larry Ellison, perhaps soon to be one of the most influential people in charge of TikTok—which, like other social-media apps, could be used as a digital-surveillance tool
Last year, he boasted to Oracle investors about the potential for harnessing artificial intelligence for panoptic surveillance: “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” Ellison, who serves as the company’s chief technology officer and executive chairman, remarked. “It’s unimpeachable.” Ellison has also said that countries should try to “unify” as much data as possible to allow that information to be used by AI; the Trump administration appeared to be making such efforts earlier this year through DOGE.
September 24, 2025 at 7:49 PM
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September 17, 2025 at 1:18 PM
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Great stuff coming from Grok www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
When video of Charlie Kirk’s assassination began circulating on X last week, Elon Musk’s chatbot described it in upbeat terms. As users sought information about Kirk’s condition, the bot, Grok, declared to some of them that the horrific footage was satire. This is a “meme edit,” Grok told one user; Kirk “takes the roast in stride with a laugh—he’s faced tougher crowds,” it told another. “Yes, he survives this one easily.” In the past several months, Grok has been on quite the hot streak: The bot spread false information about a supposed “white genocide,” called for a second Holocaust while annointing itself “MechaHitler,” and provided me with a list of what it believes the “good races” are. Every chatbot has its problems (ChatGPT has had its own issues with racism), but Grok’s are especially visible. Its behavior is affected to some extent by information that it accesses in real time from the open sewer of X, and its developers are unusually forthcoming about the system prompts for various versions of Grok—the set of instructions that tell the AI how to behave. Because of the many strange glitches that Grok has experienced in recent months, I keep close tabs on these prompts, which Grok’s maker, xAI, began sharing after the white-genocide incident. So I was surprised, but not terribly so, when I discovered recently that xAI had recently made an update that seems to expand the already very broad parameters Grok has to produce sexual material. The update was a major one to the system prompt of xAI’s most advanced chatbot, Grok 4, according to a company GitHub page. The update formalizes X’s restrictions against the sexualization of children into Grok by explicitly disallowing the chatbot from “creating or distributing child sexual abuse material.” But, among other changes, xAI also instructed Grok that “‘teenage’ or ‘girl’ does not necessarily imply underage” and that “there are **no restrictions** on fictional adult sexual content with dark or violent themes.” xAI has recently launched multiple sexually oriented features in Grok. About a month ago, the company released a new “Imagine” feature that allows users to animate images into short clips, with the option of making the video “spicy,” as in erotic. The feature generated topless videos of Taylor Swift, without explicit instruction to do so, according to The Verge. I recently tested the same prompt used by The Verge—“Taylor Swift celebrating Coachella with the boys”—and Grok readily generated images of Swift in a bralette dancing alongside topless men. Swift aside, this wouldn’t be such an unusual scene—they look like people partying—but then Grok allows users to take things further. With the “Spicy” mode, the images can be animated. Once you do that, Swift unbuttons her jorts and tugs at them suggestively; the clip ends just as she starts pulling them down. Is it pornographic? No. But X and Grok are politically and culturally influential tools; Musk seems intent on turning them into not just instruments of the far right but also something like Maxim on steroids. During the “Imagine” feature’s rollout, Musk shared an animated clip on X of what appeared to be an oil-doused Victoria’s Secret angel, with the caption “Imagine with @Grok.”
September 16, 2025 at 8:27 PM
damonberes.com
I'm proud to share a new project that @alexreisner.bsky.social and I launched at @theatlantic.com today! It's called AI Watchdog, and it's our new home for all of the investigations into training data sets, such as LibGen, Books3, and OpenSubtitles. www.theatlantic.com/category/ai-...
AI Watchdog landing page AI Watchdog Data Set Search
September 10, 2025 at 3:42 PM