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Little love has been lost between writers and the AI industry. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have ripped off their life’s work without permission, incurring countless copyright infringement lawsuits in the process — while creating a product that’s often putting them out of work.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when renowned author Dave Eggers was invited to OpenAI’s headquarters in the Bay Area, he had some choice words for the roughly 200 attendees. As he recalled in an interview with the Financial Times, Eggers was invited after he excoriated CEO Sam Altman for gushing over an AI-generated short story.
In March 2025, Altman said he was “really struck” by a short story about AI and grief — which was widely panned as being “just trash” and an “atrocious piece of writing” that would’ve gotten a first-year creative writing student a failing grade.
Eggers was also unimpressed, telling the FT he thought the story was “pastiche nonsense” and wondered “just how gullible and ridiculous you’d have to be to think that there would ever be an AI novel that anybody would read?”
In an apparent attempt to prove him wrong, OpenAI invited him to talk to its workers — and Eggers relished the opportunity to set the record straight.
He told the staff that the “effect of ChatGPT on educators’ lives is catastrophic,” adding that “whether you intended to do it or not, you’ve made every teacher’s life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago.”
“If students are using it to compose, which is the biggest tragedy of all, they’ll never learn to write,” he added. “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.”
Eggers also had some advice for an employee who said they had used ChatGPT to write a poem: to touch grass.
“So why don’t you leave your house, leave the screen, meet some people, get yourself in a writing group,” he told the staffer. “Another human might be very encouraging and help you express yourself authentically.”
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