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.
- Eggers warned that students who use ChatGPT to write essays will never develop their own voice or learn to tell their own stories.
- Eggers has previously called AI-generated writing "pastiche nonsense" and wrote a bestselling novel, The Circle, that is a sharp critique of the tech industry.
Sam Altman invited the wrong guy to deliver a feel-good pep talk.
Last year, Altman asked Dave Eggers, one of America's most prolific writers and the founder of a string of schools and nonprofits that support writers, to come and speak to around 200 OpenAI staff. OpenAI is the San Francisco company that built ChatGPT, the chatbot that around 800 million people now use each week.
Eggers did not come bearing tips on productivity or creativity.
According to reporting first published by the Financial Times, he told 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."
He saved his sharpest words 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.
Eggers wrote The Circle, a bestselling novel that dissects Silicon Valley's habit of wrapping surveillance and control in cheerful, helpful-sounding products. He has also called AI-generated writing "pastiche nonsense," a word that means a shallow imitation stitched together from other people's work.
Why does this matter for ordinary people?
It matters because the debate Eggers brought into OpenAI's own meeting room is happening in every school right now. Teachers across the world are trying to work out whether a student's essay reflects genuine understanding or a few seconds of copy-pasting from a chatbot. For parents, that is a practical question: is your child actually learning to think and communicate, or skipping that work entirely?
Eggers is not the first writer to raise this alarm. He is, however, 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.
Whether that conversation changed any minds at OpenAI is not known. What is clear is that the tension between AI's convenience and its cost to learning is not going away.
