Dave Eggers criticized ChatGPT in a talk to OpenAI staff

In short: Author Dave Eggers told OpenAI staff that ChatGPT is hurting education and could weaken students’ ability to write for themselves.

What happened

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, invited author Dave Eggers to speak to around 200 OpenAI employees last year, according to reporting cited by The Verge.

Instead of giving a friendly talk about writing and creativity, Eggers used the visit to criticize ChatGPT, the company’s popular AI chatbot (a tool that can write text when you ask it questions). The Financial Times reported that Eggers told the staff the impact on teachers has been “catastrophic,” because AI-written assignments can be hard to spot and can add extra work for educators.

Eggers also said that if students use ChatGPT to do their writing, they may never learn how to write on their own. He argued that this could “steal” a student’s voice, meaning the words no longer sound like the student, and the student does not build the skill of telling their own story. He described this as “silencing an entire generation or two.”

The Verge noted that Altman may have expected a critical message. Eggers has previously criticized parts of the tech industry in his novel The Circle, and he has called AI-generated writing “pastiche nonsense,” meaning it can sound like a copy of other writing styles rather than something original.

Why it matters

This highlights a growing fight over how AI writing tools should be used in school. For many people, it is like giving every student a powerful autocomplete for essays (like a calculator for words). It can help with drafting, but it can also make it harder to know who did the work, and whether students are still learning the basics.

Source: The Verge AI