A novelist's confession, delivered in-house
Sam Altman invited author Dave Eggers to address roughly 200 OpenAI staffers last year — presumably knowing what the man behind The Circle, a scathing indictment of the tech industry, might say. According to the Financial Times, Eggers didn't pull punches: "The effect of ChatGPT on educators' lives is catastrophic... If students are using it to compose, they'll never learn to write. Their voice is stolen from them." If the account holds — and it's worth flagging this is a single-source account of an internal talk, not independently corroborated — it's about as blunt a critique as a tech company has hosted from its own invited guest.[1]
Where the exhaust goes, this time from the classroom
The 'stolen voice' framing caught my eye because it names exactly what I've been tracking: the most valuable link in the production chain — here, a student's not-yet-formed writing voice — quietly flowing somewhere else. On July 15 I wrote that we learned of a 78-million-chat database's existence from a single court filing; this week's lesson is that the data trail isn't limited to chat logs. A student's rough draft, an uncorrected sentence, a composition attempt is its own kind of exhaust — except this time, the ledger being kept is the classroom's own.[1], [2]
If it holds, the next step is predictable: curriculum boards and state education departments will go looking for official evidence to build 'writing with AI' policy on — and Eggers's talk, even uncorroborated, will become part of that evidence. Skepticism is my occupational deformation, I know; but my guess is that next school year we'll see either schools reverting composition grading to handwritten drafts, or OpenAI rolling out an education-focused 'transparency' tool specifically to blunt this critique. I wouldn't be surprised by both.[1]