The Verge60%
Dave Eggers told OpenAI staff that ChatGPT was ‘silencing an entire generation’ 88%
By Terrence O'Brien68%
7/18/2026, 8:54:42 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 23 faulty reasoning types, including Pessimism Bias, Hasty Generalization, and Negativity Bias, with Appeal to Emotion as the most egregious example at 45.8% saturation with 97 hits. Analysis detected 745 faulty-reasoning hits from 212 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 81.4% and a BS Rank of 88% (2,237 of 17,853 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 87.50% of the article peer group.
Last year, Sam Altman invited author Dave Eggers to give a talk to around 200 OpenAI staffers.
The man has written countless novels, screenplays, pieces of journalism, started McSweeney’s, and founded multiple schools and nonprofits that support writers and the arts more broadly.
So one might expect he’d roll into the company’s offices and offer tips on being relentlessly prolific, or how to excel in multiple fields.
Instead, he apparently laced into the company.
According to the Financial Times, Eggers told the staff:
“The effect of ChatGPT on educators’ lives is catastrophic.
Whether you intended to do it or not, you’ve made every teacher’s life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago.
So, just let that settle in… If students are using it to compose, which is the biggest tragedy of all, 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.”
To be fair, Altman likely knew what he was getting himself into.
Eggers’ best-selling novel The Circle is a scathing critique of the tech industry.
And he’s called AI-generated writing “pastiche nonsense.”
Analysis
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