Author Invited to Give Speech at OpenAI Headquarters, Trashes AI to Their Faces

Sam Altman invited his loudest critic into the building and handed him a microphone. Dave Eggers — the novelist behind The Circle, a book about a tech company swallowing human autonomy whole — stood inside OpenAI’s Bay Area headquarters and told the room their flagship product is “silencing an entire generation.” The setup practically writes itself. In March 2025, Altman posted an AI-generated short story on X, roughly 1,200 words about grief, and called the model “good at creative writing.” The story featured the phrase “a democracy of ghosts “ — a line previously used by Nabokov in his 1957 novel Pnin. A ghost of a ghost, recycled without attribution. Eggers’ public response was blunt: “pastiche garbage” and “a cheap party trick,” per eWeek. That exchange earned him the invitation.

Here’s what Eggers actually said to the room:

ChatGPT is “silencing an entire generation” of young writers who outsource their voice to a machine before ever finding it

“The effect of ChatGPT on educators’ lives is catastrophic” — adding, per AI Weekly, a claimed 20 hours a week to every public school teacher’s workload

Students who use AI to compose “will never learn to write” and have their voice “stolen from them”

There is “no safe amount of AI in humanities for kids under 22, at least in writing”

When an employee mentioned using ChatGPT to write a poem, Eggers’ advice was direct: go outside, meet real people, join a writing group

“If students are using it to compose, which is the biggest tragedy of all, they’ll never learn to write. And their voice is stolen from them.” — Dave Eggers

Not Everyone in the Literary World Agrees With Eggers

The counterarguments are real, even if the evidence behind them is still catching up.

His framing is “apocalyptic” — his word — but dissenting voices exist. Authors like Jeanette Winterson have suggested AI could become another creative medium rather than a wholesale replacement for human expression. Empirical research on AI writing in sch…