Dan Shipper
Co-founder and CEO at Every.
“I think there is a real dirty secret right now that almost every writer is using it. Just most of them are not saying.”
Platformer · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · August 2026
Casey Newton asks what separates writers who get better with AI from those who lose themselves in it. Shipper, who runs Every and builds AI writing tools, answers by saying the quiet part first. He goes on to joke about wanting a writers' anonymous group where people could come and confess.
Transcript
…never have been able to spend the time ordinarily to do that unless I was like living on my Russian, you know, manner of whatever. And I didn't have any work to do, but I can do that. But I am also thinking about it. It's like I'm in the driver's seat. And I think that's an important distinction.
…of creatives about their creative process. And I wonder, while this is a very fraught topic in the creative community, for those who are curious about using AI as part of their creative process, what has separated the writers who get better with AI from the ones who sort of lose themselves in it?
So here's the thing. I think there is a real dirty secret right now that almost every writer is using it. Just most of them are not saying. And I almost want to have a little writer's anonymous support group to just have people come and confess that they use AI because they're all you some more than others and some are truly still like with pen and paper but like George R. Martin still writes in DOS that's just a common thing writers have very particular preferences for how they do their thing yeah but he
hasn't finished a novel in like 20 years so I'm not sure we want to be holding him up as a productivity model
he's definitely not a definitely not a productivity model but um uh so i but i think that i mean the writers that do it well it's the same thing for using ai well in general it's this it's like putty it's like a you can do anything with it and your goal is to find something that you're excited…
all right well we will leave it there the company is every dan thanks for joining us