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Dave Eggers Accused ChatGPT of Silencing a Generation
Dave Eggers told roughly 200 OpenAI staffers that ChatGPT is making teaching harder and could strip students of their voices.
Image: The Verge
When Dave Eggers accepted Sam Altman’s invitation to speak to roughly 200 OpenAI employees last year, the author used the opportunity to sharply criticize ChatGPT’s impact on education.
According to the Financial Times, Eggers said the chatbot had made teachers' lives “infinitely more difficult” and warned that students who use it to write may never develop their own voices.
“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.”
Eggers has written novels, screenplays, and journalism, founded McSweeney’s, and started multiple schools and nonprofits supporting writers and the arts. His comments also align with his earlier criticism of generative writing, which he has called “pastiche nonsense.”
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Altman may have known the speech would be confrontational. Eggers' best-selling novel The Circle is a pointed critique of the technology industry, and the author has been a prominent critic of AI-generated prose.
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Ava covers the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, from foundational models and research labs to the real-world economics of intelligence. With a background in computational linguistics, she cuts through the hype to find out what actually works. She firmly believes that benchmarks are just marketing until reproduced in the wild.
via The Verge
