Little love has been lost between writers and the AI industry. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have ripped off their life’s work without permission, incurring countless copyright infringement lawsuits in the process — while creating a product that’s often putting them out of work.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when renowned author Dave Eggers was invited to OpenAI’s headquarters in the Bay Area, he had some choice words for the roughly 200 attendees. As he recalled in an interview with the Financial Times, Eggers was invited after he excoriated CEO Sam Altman for gushing over an AI-generated short story.
In March 2025, Altman said he was “really struck” by a short story about AI and grief — which was widely panned as being “just trash” and an “atrocious piece of writing” that would’ve gotten a first-year creative writing student a failing grade.
Eggers was also unimpressed, telling the FT he thought the story was “pastiche nonsense” and wondered “just how gullible and ridiculous you’d have to be to think that there would ever be an AI novel that anybody would read?”
