When Sam Altman invited author Dave Eggers to speak to about 200 OpenAI staffers last year, he probably should have checked the guest's bibliography first. Eggers, the man behind the tech-industry takedown novel *The Circle* and a vocal critic of AI-generated writing as "pastiche nonsense," didn't come to offer tips on productivity. Instead, according to the Financial Times, he laced into the company with a message that was less "you're changing the world" and more "you've made every teacher's life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago."

Eggers told the assembled employees that ChatGPT's effect on educators is "catastrophic," arguing that if students use the tool to compose, "they'll never learn to write. 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." It's a bold claim, but coming from a man who founded McSweeney's and multiple nonprofits supporting writers, he's earned the right to be dramatic about the death of original prose.