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Dave Eggers, author of The Circle and founder of several writing-education nonprofits, told roughly 200 OpenAI employees last year that ChatGPT is catastrophic for educators and that students who use it to compose will never develop their own voice. Sam Altman invited him, apparently knowing the critique was coming. Eggers framed the harm not as cheating but as something deeper: a generation losing the capacity to articulate their own truth, which is a different and harder problem for any enterprise to dismiss.
What this means for your business
Whether or not you find Eggers persuasive, the workforce entering your organization over the next decade is being shaped right now by decisions about AI and writing. If the concern holds even partially, the talent pipeline question isn’t just “can candidates use AI tools?” but whether they can think, argue, and communicate without one. HR leaders who rely on writing samples, structured written interviews, or narrative self-assessments in hiring will find those signals increasingly difficult to interpret.
Eggers is a credentialed advocate for human writing, which gives his argument moral weight but also a particular tilt: he frames composition as almost purely a developmental act, where the struggle is the point. That framing is defensible for literary voice, but it underweights the possibility that AI-assisted drafting, used well, could still produce writers who think clearly if organizations build the scaffolding to require it. The honest read is that nobody knows yet, and that uncertainty itself is the actual enterprise risk, not the settled catastrophe Eggers describes.
The sharper question for CHROs isn’t whether to trust Eggers or Altman. It’s whether your current onboarding and development programs can even detect a writing-capability gap when a new hire’s output has been AI-polished at every stage of their education. If your performance frameworks haven’t been updated to assess unassisted reasoning under pressure, you may be measuring confidence in a tool rather than competence in the person holding it. That’s the budget line to revisit, not AI adoption itself.
Based on reporting from Dave Eggers told OpenAI staff that ChatGPT was ‘silencing an entire generation’, originally published 2026-07-18 16:54:00.
