AI Needs Us—Yes, Really

Hello, and happy Sunday! 🧹 Housekeeping note: Every is hiring a freelance social media strategist—could that be you? Scroll down for the details.—Kate Lee

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Knowledge base

"Midjourney Isn’t the Most Accurate AI—That’s Why It’s the Best" by Lucas Crespo/Source Code: Perfect isn't always best. While ChatGPT can now render text flawlessly and follow image prompts with surgical precision, Midjourney still struggles with both—and that's exactly why it's superior for creative work. Read this if you want to understand why the best creative tools don't give you what you ask for, but what you didn't know you needed.

"How We Made AI Diplomacy Work" by Alex Duffy: Alex and his team built an AI version of the game Diplomacy, attracting 50,000 live viewers on Twitch. In this piece, he explains exactly how they did it and the lessons they learned about constructing an AI benchmark. Read this for a fascinating look at “context engineering”—the art of communicating with AI in ways that unlock their potential.

"The Better AI Gets, The More It Needs Us" by Alex Duffy/Context Window: As AI models become increasingly sophisticated, you might think humans are becoming obsolete. Plot twist: We're more valuable than ever. Read this if you want to understand why “rare data hunter” might be the hottest job title of the next decade, and why the path to powerful AI still runs straight through human expertise. Plus: All the AI news of the week.

"o3-pro Vibe Check—A Slow, Steady Last Resort" by Dan Shipper/Chain of Thought: IOpenAI’s o3 Pro is painfully slow—we're talking 5–20 minutes per response—but occasionally it’s brilliant. Dan put this last-resort model through its paces and found it's definitely not your go-to for daily tasks or coding, but it shines when you need deep research capabilities. Read this if you want to know when to surrender to the slowest—but sometimes smartest—AI on the block.

"Cora Is Out of Beta: Give AI Your Inbox, Take Back Your Life" by Dan Shipper & Kieran Klaassen/AI & I: If you’ve ever dreamed of having a personal assistant to handle your email deluge, we have the tool for you: Cora—an AI chief of staff for your inbox—just launched publicly after a successful beta with 2,500 users. → Try Cora if you're drowning in emails and want to reclaim hours of your life each week. 🎧 🖥 Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

​​Join Every

We're hiring a freelance social media strategist. Be the voice of Every on social media. You'll maintain and evolve Every's established voice on X and LinkedIn, building on our existing playbook while experimenting with new formats and platforms to grow our audience and engagement. You're fluent with AI tools, using them to scale content creation and streamline workflows. You're deeply attuned to the online tech conversation, actively participating in discussions about AI and technology trends, with a keen sense for both marketing a subscription bundle and extracting the most compelling insights from our stories. You’re a master of metrics, with the ability to identify and double down on what’s working. The ideal candidate has excellent writing skills, fluency in social analytics, and familiarity with tools (including, but not limited to, Figma, Descript, and Buffer). You should move fast, be scrappy, and—most of all—love Every. If you're interested, email Kate Lee at [email protected] with your LinkedIn profile, examples of tweets (written for either a personal and/or corporate account), and why you'd like to join us.

Alignment

Fiction fights back. The Atlantic reports that Google’s AI summaries have gutted news traffic by 34 percent, starving journalism and nonfiction of readers. You didn’t need a crystal ball to figure out this was inevitable. AI thrives because it compresses. It turns bloated articles and costly subscriptions into concise, algorithmically perfected summaries for which you don’t need to pay $12 per month. Readers save money, but above all, they save time.

Yet fiction sales are surging, up 31 percent in India, 21 percent in Mexico, and 16 percent in Brazil. What's with the disparity? I think it’s because great fiction refuses to be compressed. You can’t neatly summarize Dostoevsky’s suffering or package up Cormac McCarthy’s moral ambiguity into bullet points. Fiction is valuable precisely because it’s messy, unpredictable, and resistant to algorithmic shortcuts. It forces you to slow down and engage, which runs counter to AI’s streamlining superpower. Maybe fiction is surging because readers around the world are reminding us that the point isn’t always to save time. It’s to spend it well.—Ashwin Sharma

That’s all for this week! Be sure to follow Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

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