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 schools remains limited; preliminary findings suggest students report feeling less ownership over AI-assisted work, though current data doesn’t yet support the full doomsday picture. It doesn’t refute it either.
The broader collision Eggers represents keeps escalating regardless. Literary magazines have paused open submissions, overwhelmed by AI in humanities they can’t reliably distinguish from human work. Amazon’s marketplace is crowded with chatbot-assembled titles flooding out human authors. Hachette pulled a horror novel after accusations of undisclosed AI assistance. Eggers himself is party to multiple copyright lawsuits against AI companies, calling their training practices “a hundred percent plagiarism,” per Roborant Review. Legal outcomes in those cases will likely determine whether AI firms must license literary material — or face serious constraints on how they build future models.
Eggers called the session “a very poignant hour.” That phrase is the tell — even he found something worth having in confronting the engineers face-to-face. The question those 200 employees carried out of the room is the same one their product keeps surfacing: what exactly disappears when the struggle to find your own words does?
