Dave Eggers Told 200 OpenAI Staff Their Chatbot Is 'Silencing a Generation'
The author of The Circle accepted Sam Altman's invitation to speak at OpenAI's offices, then spent the time telling employees exactly what he thinks they've done to teachers and students.
Key points
- Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT), personally invited author Dave Eggers to speak to roughly 200 employees.
- Eggers told the room that ChatGPT has made "every teacher's life infinitely more difficult" than it was two years ago.
- Students who use ChatGPT to write essays will never develop their own voice, Eggers argued, and that amounts to a generation robbed of its story.
- Eggers wrote The Circle, a bestselling novel that is a sharp critique of the tech industry, and has called AI-generated writing "pastiche nonsense".
Sam Altman invited the wrong guy to deliver a feel-good pep talk.
Last year, Altman asked Dave Eggers to come and address around 200 OpenAI staff. Eggers has written novels, screenplays and journalism, founded McSweeney's, and built schools and nonprofits that back writers. OpenAI is the San Francisco company that built ChatGPT.
He did not arrive bearing productivity tips.
Reporting first published by the Financial Times quotes him telling the room: "The effect of ChatGPT on educators' lives is catastrophic. Whether you intended to do it or not, you've made every teacher's life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago. So, just let that settle in."
The sharpest words were saved for students.
"If students are using it to compose, which is the biggest tragedy of all, they'll never learn to write," Eggers said. "And their voice is stolen from them. They'll never have the ability to say their truth and tell their own story. And that's silencing an entire generation or two."
Altman could hardly have been shocked. The Circle, Eggers' bestselling novel, dissects Silicon Valley's habit of wrapping surveillance and control in cheerful, helpful-sounding products. He has also called AI-generated writing "pastiche nonsense," meaning a shallow imitation stitched from other people's work.
Why does this matter for ordinary people?
It matters because the argument Eggers carried into OpenAI's own meeting room is happening in every school right now. Teachers everywhere are trying to work out whether a student's essay reflects genuine understanding or a few seconds with a chatbot. Parents face a real consequence: children may be skipping the hard cognitive work that writing actually trains.
We've tracked the classroom angle across 13 education stories since 13 July 2026, and the concern keeps sharpening rather than fading.
Eggers is not the first writer to raise this alarm. He is one of the few people Altman handed a microphone to, inside his own company, who used it to say so directly to the people building the tool. My read: the speech probably didn't move the product roadmap an inch, but the fact that Altman issued the invitation at all suggests someone at the top knows the cost-to-learning argument won't stay outside the building forever.
