Some invitations carry an obvious risk. When Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, asked novelist Dave Eggers to address roughly 200 of the company's staff last year, he was inviting one of American literature's most outspoken critics of Silicon Valley into the heart of the industry he has long distrusted. What followed, according to reporting by the Financial Times, was not a masterclass in creative productivity. It was, by most accounts, a dismantling.

Eggers — who founded the literary magazine McSweeney's, has written numerous novels and screenplays, and established several schools and nonprofits dedicated to supporting writers — told the assembled OpenAI employees that the damage their flagship product had done to education was not incidental but catastrophic. "The effect of ChatGPT on educators' lives is catastrophic," he said. "Whether you intended to do it or not, you've made every teacher's life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago." He then turned to what he described as the deepest harm of all: students who use the tool to compose their writing may never develop a voice of their own, and in losing that, they lose the ability to articulate their own truth entirely.

The confrontation matters beyond its drama because it crystallises a tension that is rarely aired so directly inside the companies driving the AI boom. Critics in academia and the arts have long argued that generative AI does not merely assist expression — it displaces the effortful struggle through which a writer's identity is actually formed. Eggers has previously dismissed AI-generated prose as "pastiche nonsense," and his earlier novel The Circle offered a forensic critique of tech-industry hubris that resonated widely across Europe and beyond.