Dave Eggers told OpenAI staff that ChatGPT was ‘silencing an entire generation’

So Dave Eggers got a personal invitation from Sam Altman to stroll into OpenAI HQ and tell the troops they're 'silencing an entire generation.' That's like inviting a vegetarian to critique your butcher shop's ethics — brave, or just spectacularly confident that no one will listen. Eggers, author of *The Circle* (which aged like milk, then wine, then bitter vinegar), told the staff directly that students using ChatGPT to compose will never learn to write. Never mind that Altman probably thought this would be a nice bit of branding — 'look, we engage with our critics!' — while the product quietly destroys the very scaffolding of written expression.

This is the same company that has spent billions on making the model sound more human, more convincing, more fluent, while the actual humans using it become less so. Eggers called it 'silencing,' which is the sort of verb you use for totalitarian regimes, not productivity tools. But here we are: the CEO of the world's most hyped AI company invites a novelist to validate his users' worst fears, and the novelist obliges. The kicker? Nothing will change. The model will ship, the students will use it, and the next generation of PR scripts will call it 'augmenting creativity' or some such rot.

Altman gets to look magnanimous for hosting the critique; Eggers gets headlines; the staff get a stern talking-to before they go back to fine-tuning the next token-predictor. Everyone's conscience is salved, and the transformation of education into a series of AI-generated summaries continues apace. Cheers to progress — and by progress, I mean the carefully managed spectacle of dissent that changes absolutely nothing.