Author Dave Eggers used a talk hosted by OpenAI, at Sam Altman's invitation, to sharply criticise the company over ChatGPT's impact on education and young people's writing abilities. Rather than offering career advice to the roughly 200 staff present, Eggers reportedly accused the company of making teachers' lives "infinitely more difficult" and of enabling students to outsource their writing to AI, which he argued strips them of their own voice and storytelling ability.

According to the Financial Times, Eggers told staff that ChatGPT's effect on educators has been "catastrophic" and that students using it to compose work represents "the biggest tragedy of all," warning it amounts to "silencing an entire generation or two." The intervention is consistent with his long-standing scepticism of the tech industry: his bestselling novel The Circle is a critique of Silicon Valley, and he has previously dismissed AI-generated writing as "pastiche nonsense," suggesting Altman likely anticipated the confrontational tone.