There’s little love lost between writers and the AI industry. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are plagiarizing their life’s work without permission, filing countless copyright infringement lawsuits in the process, while also developing products that often cost them their jobs.
So it’s no surprise that when renowned author Dave Eggers was invited to OpenAI’s headquarters in the Bay Area, he had a few choice words for the approximately 200 attendees. As he recalled in an interview, financial timesEggers was invited after he accused CEO Sam Altman of debunking AI-generated short stories.
In March 2025, Altman said he was “really shocked” by a short story about AI and grief. The short story was widely criticized as “just trash” and “terribly written” that would give a first-year creative writing student a failing grade.
Mr. Eggers was unimpressed. F.T. He considered the story “pastiche nonsense” and wondered, “How gullible and ridiculous would we be to think there is an AI novel that everyone will read?”
Apparently trying to prove him wrong, OpenAI invited him to speak to its employees, and Eggers relished the opportunity to set the record straight.
“ChatGPT’s impact on the lives of educators has been devastating,” he told staff, adding that “whether intended or not, it is making every teacher’s life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago.”
“If students are using it to compose music, that’s the biggest tragedy, but they’ll never learn to write,” he added. “And their voices will be taken away. They will never be able to tell the truth and tell their own stories. And that will silence an entire generation or two.”
Eggers also gave an employee who allegedly used ChatGPT to write a poem a piece of advice about touching grass.
“So why not get out of the house, step away from the screen, meet some people and join a writing group,” he told his staff. “Another person might be very encouraging and help you express yourself.”
“It ended up being a very emotional time,” Eggers concluded.
The best-selling author’s comments are cathartic, to say the least. Eggers is one of many prominent authors, from Lev Grossman to Kazuo Ishiguro, who have spoken out against the use of AI.
For years, writers have watched large language model-based tools make a mockery of their work. The advent of AI chatbots has also created a whole new class of people who call themselves “novelists,” churning out dozens of “books” made entirely of AI drivel and culling out real writing in the market. Amazon in particular is flooded with pointless self-published AI nonsense.
That’s not all. Students have long relied on AI tools to write essays and other assignments and are rapidly losing their ability to read.
Amid the AI cheating crisis, teachers are returning to using pen and paper and banning the use of laptops and smartphones. Due to the proliferation of AI, literary magazines are no longer accepting submissions from writers.
Even prominent publisher Hachette Book Group, one of the largest publishers in the US, was forced to stop publishing horror novels earlier this year after the author was accused of using AI in writing the book.
In short, Mr. Eggers was perfectly within his rights to criticize OpenAI’s staff for enabling the rapid cognitive decline of an entire generation, the technology that turned educators into unwitting AI detectives and budding writers into agile engineers.
At least the author enjoyed being given the opportunity to send an important message to those who are monetizing the entire mess.
“We had the ball,” Eggers said. F.T..
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