Dave Eggers, the novelist behind The Circle and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, used a speaking invitation at OpenAI’s Bay Area headquarters to tell roughly 200 employees that ChatGPT has been catastrophic for educators, according to his interview with the Financial Times. OpenAI invited him after he publicly mocked Sam Altman for praising an AI-written short story about grief in March 2025, which Eggers dismissed as “pastiche nonsense.” He told the audience that ChatGPT had made teaching immeasurably harder over the past two years, intended or not, and that students who lean on AI to compose will never learn to write or develop a voice of their own. One employee mentioned writing a poem with ChatGPT, and Eggers suggested getting off the screen and joining a writing group with other humans instead.
