When Sam Altman brought Dave Eggers to speak with roughly 200 OpenAI employees last year, the invitation may have seemed like a chance to hear from one of America’s most prolific literary voices. Eggers has built a wide-ranging career as a novelist, screenwriter, journalist, founder of McSweeney’s, and creator of schools and nonprofit organizations devoted to writing and the arts. But rather than offering a master class in creativity or cross-discipline success, he reportedly used the moment to deliver a blunt critique of the company behind ChatGPT. As the Financial Times reported, Eggers told staffers:
“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… If students are using it to compose, which is the biggest tragedy of all, they’ll never learn to write. 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 probably was not blindsided by the criticism. Eggers has long been skeptical of Silicon Valley’s power and ambitions; his bestselling novel The Circle offered a sharp takedown of the tech industry’s culture and reach. He has also dismissed AI-generated writing as “pastiche nonsense,” making his pointed remarks about artificial intelligence, education, and student writing very much in line with his public views.
