Dave Eggers, the novelist and McSweeney’s founder, used an invitation from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to tell the company’s employees that ChatGPT is harming classrooms and student writing, according to the Financial Times.
The talk took place last year in front of roughly 200 OpenAI staff members, The Verge reported. Eggers did not use the appearance to flatter the room. According to the Financial Times, he told employees that ChatGPT’s effect on educators had been “catastrophic” and said the company had made teachers’ lives far harder than they were two years earlier.
Eggers’ argument, as reported, was not about abstract worries over artificial intelligence someday replacing culture. It was about the basic mechanics of writing instruction now: if students use ChatGPT to produce prose for them, they do not get the practice of forming sentences, making choices, failing in public, revising, and discovering a voice. Eggers told OpenAI employees that students who use the tool to compose may “never learn to write,” and said their voices were being taken from them.
He described that outcome as “silencing an entire generation or two,” according to the Financial Times.
Altman invited a known tech critic
Altman’s decision to bring Eggers into OpenAI was not exactly a mystery-box booking. Eggers wrote The Circle, a best-selling novel that takes a hostile view of the tech industry’s appetite for surveillance, scale, and self-justifying disruption. The Verge also noted that Eggers has described AI-generated writing as “pastiche nonsense.”
Eggers’ résumé spans novels, screenplays, journalism, publishing, schools, and arts nonprofits. He founded McSweeney’s and has supported writing programs and other nonprofit work tied to literature and education. That background explains why his criticism landed on authorship and learning rather than model architecture, copyright doctrine, or the current industry obsession with benchmark scores.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT can generate essays, summaries, emails, scripts, and other text from prompts. In schools, that means teachers have to deal with a tool that can produce plausible student assignments on demand. Eggers’ remarks, as reported by the Financial Times, framed that as a direct problem for educators and a developmental problem for students who outsource composition before they have learned the craft.
The available reports do not say how OpenAI employees responded to Eggers’ remarks, or whether Altman addressed the criticism during the event. OpenAI’s public pitch for ChatGPT has often emphasized productivity and assistance. Eggers gave the staff a colder reading: a writing machine that may make the people learning to write worse at being heard.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.
