Dave Eggers: 'Once you have a machine think and write for you, you're cooked as a species'

Dave Eggers is a famous American author who has written more than a dozen novels and started many nonprofit programs to help young people learn to write and make art. He spoke with a reporter in San Francisco, where he runs McSweeney's, a publishing house and literary journal he founded in 1998. His new novel, called Contrapposto, has just been published. During the interview, Eggers shared strong opinions about artificial intelligence, creative education, and why he believes every person has a unique voice that no machine can replace.

Eggers, who is 56 years old, started the interview in an unusual way — by doing a life-drawing session with the reporter. He has been drawing for decades, even though he dropped out of art school when he was young. He believes that spending time carefully drawing a real person helps build empathy, which means the ability to understand and share other people's feelings. 'I feel like in three hours of drawing a human, you learn so much about them and there is so much affection that comes from carefully trying to get them right,' he said.

Eggers has launched many nonprofit organizations over the years, most of them focused on removing barriers that keep people from enjoying literature and the arts. His newest project is called Art + Water, an arts center on the San Francisco waterfront. Ten established artists will offer free mentorship to twenty up-and-coming local artists there. Eggers points out that a master of fine arts degree in the United States can cost as much as $100,000 a year, which he calls 'absurd.' He believes nobody should be kept out of a creative writing or drawing class just because they can't afford it.

Inside the McSweeney's building, there is a special library called the International Library of Youth Writing. Local school kids can visit to read, write with a pen or a typewriter, or make their own small magazines called zines. The space is full of fun and quirky details — oriental rugs on the floor, a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I with her head replaced by a cartoon pink dog, and a hidden door behind a grandfather clock. There is even a set of tiny mailboxes where neighborhood children send each other real letters, and the library's curator writes back to them every day. Eggers loves this because it shows that kids, when given a real choice, will pick something tangible and personal over another screen.

One of Eggers's biggest concerns today is the way artificial intelligence, or AI, is sneaking into classrooms. He says the challenge AI poses to education is bigger than just a problem — it threatens the very idea of what it means to be a creative human being. He was surprised to find that even smart ten-year-olds use AI to 'generate ideas,' which he thinks is actually worse than using it to write entire essays. To push back, he reminds students that each of them is 'one of one' — completely unique in all of human history — and that no machine can think or tell a story the way they can.

Eggers's voice, which is usually quiet and almost flat, rises with energy when he talks about this topic. He warned that if people let machines do their thinking and writing for them, humanity is 'cooked as a species.' He finds it deeply troubling that people might willingly hand their voices over to a machine that has simply copied from millions of human authors. He also criticized US Education Secretary Linda McMahon for giving a speech promoting AI in schools — even for five-year-olds — while repeatedly mispronouncing 'AI' as 'A-one.' 'We're in such a comical place right now,' he said.

Eggers and his wife, the writer Vendela Vida, are part of two lawsuits against an AI company called Anthropic. They say the company used their books without permission to train its AI systems. Eggers believes the people running these companies did not even think they were stealing, because they see creative work as mere 'content.' He hates that word because it suggests writing has no real value and it does not matter whether a human or a machine produced it.

His own writing habits show just how seriously he takes the human side of creativity. He writes his first drafts by hand, then types them up on a Mac computer from 1998 that has never been connected to the internet and is now held together with duct tape. He uses an old-fashioned flip phone. Because he installed home internet during the pandemic, he now writes on a boat in San Francisco Bay to escape the distraction of being online. On the boat, there is no phone signal, and the only interruptions come from passing fishers or the occasional porpoise or harbor seal.

Eggers was born in Boston and grew up in Chicago. He became famous in 2000 with his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which told how he became the caretaker of his eight-year-old brother after both of his parents died of cancer within weeks of each other. Today, he rarely gives interviews and does not like talking about that painful time in his life. He prefers to focus on his work and on helping others create.

His new novel, Contrapposto, took about twenty years to complete, and it follows two characters — Cricket and Olympia — across six decades of friendship and almost-romance. Eggers says it took reaching the age of fifty for him to understand how to write this kind of long, life-spanning story. A key theme in the book is the complicated link between talent and success — he points out that sometimes the most gifted people never get recognized, like the best guitarist he ever saw, who was playing in a cover band in a bar in Reno. At the end of the interview, Eggers looked through the reporter's sketches and said kind, encouraging things, because that is simply the kind of person he always tries to be for anyone working to create something.