Sam Altman invited author Dave Eggers to give a talk to approximately 200 OpenAI employees last year. Eggers, whose novel The Circle remains one of the most widely read critiques of the technology industry, used the platform to attack ChatGPT’s impact on education and creative expression, according to the Financial Times.
“The effect of ChatGPT on educators’ lives is catastrophic,” Eggers told OpenAI staff, as reported by The Verge. “Whether you intended to do it or not, you’ve made every teacher’s life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago.”
The Speech
Eggers focused on what he sees as a direct link between ChatGPT availability and the erosion of writing as a learned skill. “If students are using it to compose, which is the biggest tragedy of all, they’ll never learn to write,” he said. “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.”
The remarks were delivered directly to the people building the product Eggers was criticizing. Altman likely anticipated the tone: Eggers has previously called AI-generated writing “pastiche nonsense,” according to The Verge, and The Circle (2013) depicted a tech monopoly that destroyed privacy and individual autonomy through totalizing surveillance.
Why OpenAI Invited a Critic
The invitation itself is notable. OpenAI has faced sustained criticism from creative professionals since ChatGPT’s launch, including copyright lawsuits from the Authors Guild, the New York Times, and individual writers. Bringing a prominent literary critic into the office to speak directly to staff suggests either genuine interest in engaging with opposition or a bet that exposure to criticism would inoculate employees against it.
The FT report does not indicate how OpenAI staff responded to the speech, whether Altman addressed Eggers’ claims afterward, or what prompted the invitation in the first place. OpenAI has not publicly commented on the event.
The Slop Problem at Agent Scale
Eggers framed his critique around education, but the concern extends to the infrastructure being built around AI-generated content. As agents gain the ability to produce text, code, and creative output autonomously and at scale, the volume of machine-generated content entering education, publishing, and public discourse increases proportionally. The question Eggers posed to 200 engineers applies equally to every team deploying autonomous content generation: what happens to human skill development when the cost of bypassing it drops to zero?