Dan Shipper, the founder of the media start-up Every, says he gets asked a lot whether he thinks robots will replace writers. He swears they won’t, at least not at his company.
“I want to make a lot more great writing,” he said during an interview at the company’s airy Brooklyn office, “particularly great writing about technology.”
But there’s a reason he gets asked.
Mr. Shipper’s five-year-old company has put artificial intelligence at the center of its business model. His writers, like those at numerous other media companies, write about developments with the technology. Every, though, also uses generative A.I. to create software products, including an online writing tool, that are core to its business. Subscribers pay $200 a year for access to those tools, which has led to about $1 million in annual revenue.
That revenue is tiny in the booming world of A.I. But Every’s business has generated intense interest inside media circles — and become something of a Rorschach test for the news industry. It is a symbol of A.I.’s potential to empower journalists or unemploy them, depending on your point of view.
On Wednesday, the company announced that it had raised $2 million from a group of investors including Reid Hoffman, the venture capitalist and founder of LinkedIn. That round values Every at $25 million, Mr. Shipper said.
Mr. Shipper, 33, started Every with a mission to combine articles from writers into a single bundle, an old idea that has been tried many times. When that finally got off the ground, he realized that he had essentially created a digital magazine.
“We realized that we were basically just building a publication with a bunch of columnists,” Mr. Shipper said. He added, “Eventually, I just admitted that to myself.”
So when ChatGPT was released in 2022, he changed course to Every’s current incarnation — a mix of online magazine, software studio and consulting firm. The company’s first product, Lex, an A.I.-powered word processor, garnered 25,000 users in 24 hours. The company now has 14 employees and 4,500 paid users.
Mr. Shipper is also advising other executives grappling with the rise of A.I. The company’s consulting arm works with media companies — including The Athletic, a unit of The New York Times — on how to use the technology. (The Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
Brandon Gell, who runs Every’s consulting arm, said he essentially told clients what he would do if he wanted to use A.I. to disrupt their businesses. He has worked with private equity firms to help their workers be more efficient, he said, but isn’t interested in helping companies automate workers out of their jobs.
“There’s A.I. adoption: How can your team do twice as much?” Mr. Gell said. “Then there’s A.I. innovation: Where’s the next multiple of your revenue going to come from, and how can you go accomplish that with the same number of people?”
Kate Lee, Every’s editor in chief, said the company had begun to train an A.I. tool to help its contributors select headlines, essentially automating and distributing the publication’s news judgment and editorial taste. Every also encourages using A.I. to help with the writing and editing of stories — which many newsrooms frown upon.
“All of our writers and editors use A.I. in some capacity,” Ms. Lee said.
In addition to Lex, Every has produced a suite of A.I. tools for subscribers: Sparkle, which organizes files; Cora, which summarizes emails to reduce inbox clutter; and Spiral, which automatically generates social media posts to promote videos and podcasts.
Mr. Shipper argues that the advent of generative A.I. is merely the latest step in a centuries-long technological march that has brought writers closer to their own ideas. Along the way, most typesetters and scriveners have been erased. But the part of writing that most requires humans remains intact: a perspective and taste, and A.I. can help form both even though it doesn’t have either on its own, he said.
“One example of a thing that journalists do that language models cannot is come and have this conversation with me,” Mr. Shipper said. “You’re going out and talking to people every day at the very edge of their experience. That’s always changing. And language models just don’t have access to that, because it’s not on the internet.”
Mr. Shipper said he had even used A.I. to prepare for the interview for this article. He said he had asked ChatGPT to do a mock interview with him, as a kind of trial run to predict what questions he might be asked.
“It did terribly,” Mr. Shipper said.
Perhaps that is a sign that human journalists can’t be replaced by A.I.
For now, at least.
Benjamin Mullin reports for The Times on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact him securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or at [email protected].
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