Dave Eggers told OpenAI staff that ChatGPT was ‘silencing an entire generation’
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- Sam Altman invited author Dave Eggers to speak to around 200 OpenAI staffers last year, but Eggers used the occasion to attack the company's flagship product rather than offer professional advice.
- Dave Eggers told the OpenAI audience that ChatGPT's effect on educators' lives has been 'catastrophic,' saying the company has made every teacher's life 'infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago.'
- Eggers warned that students using ChatGPT to compose will never learn to write, arguing their voice is 'stolen from them' and they will never develop the ability to tell their own story — a scenario he described as 'silencing an entire generation or two.'
- Eggers has a long track record of critiquing the tech industry: his best-selling novel The Circle is a scathing satire of Silicon Valley, and he has previously called AI-generated writing 'pastiche nonsense.'
- Altman was likely aware of the risk in inviting Eggers given the author's well-documented hostility toward the technology industry, yet proceeded with the invitation anyway.
Why it matters: By inviting an author famous for skewering tech companies to address roughly 200 employees, OpenAI's Sam Altman effectively gave one of its sharpest cultural critics a captive audience — and the quoted remarks, reported by the Financial Times, underline how unresolved the creative-class backlash against generative AI tools remains even inside the labs building them.
