Eggers Warns AI Makes Humans 'Cooked as a Species'
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Dave Eggers declared that letting machines think and write for humans leaves the species 'cooked,' noting that even a 'smart 10-year-old' told him they use AI to 'generate ideas, which is far, far worse' than using it to write
- Eggers and his wife, writer Vendela Vida, are plaintiffs in two class-action lawsuits against Anthropic over the firm's unauthorized use of their books to train large language models
- Eggers spoke at OpenAI's campus at Sam Altman's invitation about AI-written novels, telling staff 'there's no such thing as AI art' and finding the visit 'a really nice afternoon'
- Eggers mocked US Education Secretary Linda McMahon for championing AI in schools as young as age five while repeatedly referring to it as 'A-one'
- McSweeney's founder (established 1998 in San Francisco) is launching Art + Water, a free waterfront arts center pairing 10 established artists with 20 emerging artists, calling the $100,000-a-year cost of an MFA 'absurd'
- Eggers drafts by hand on a 1998 Mac computer that has never been connected to the internet and now writes on a boat in San Francisco Bay to escape connectivity
Why it matters: Eggers isn't theorizing about AI harms — he's litigating them, joining two class actions against Anthropic over book training data while publicly pushing back on federal plans to introduce AI to children as young as five. His dual role as Anthropic plaintiff and OpenAI campus guest underscores that the copyright fight over AI training data has moved from theoretical to courtroom-active, with named authors on the offensive.
