Dave Eggers vs. AI
Tune in today to part two of our live conversation with Dave Eggers, whose new novel, "Contrapposto," is our July Ink Book Club selection
Join the Ink Book Club Live later today at 12:30 p.m. Eastern for our second and final conversation with Dave Eggers. Now that you’ve had a few weeks since our initial announcement of Contrapposto as our July pick, let’s dig further into how the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius conceived this portrait of aspiring artists and soulmates Cricket and Olympia, and their lifelong struggles to make sense of the world through their friendship, their activism, and their art.
While Contrapposto is a coming-of-age tale that is remarkably tech-free, Eggers has lately been in the news for his take on generative AI — which he terms “a catastrophic technology.” He brought that critique to Open AI staffers last year at the invitation of CEO Sam Altman, where he told those gathered that in facilitating the use of AI, they are perpetrating “a crime against yourself.” Addressing some 200 employees, Eggers pulled no punches, warning that “whether you intended to do it or not, you’ve made every teacher’s life infinitely more difficult.” Eggers says he came away from that meeting believing that while OpenAI engineers might be well-intentioned, they are too “compartmentalized” to comprehend “the collective harm” their innovation is wreaking. He charged that the use of AI tools by students risks “silencing an entire generation of young writers.” We’ll ask him to talk more about this, and how he proposes we prevent that prophesy from materializing. We’ll also discuss the prescience of his novels — 2013’s The Circle and its sequel, The Every —which satirized and anticipated the immense power, hypocrisy, and overreach of big tech companies.
And then tomorrow, Thursday, July 30 at 12:30 p.m., we’ll speak with renowned White Mountain Apache chef Nephi Craig, whose searing memoir, Our Knives Will Save Us, elucidates how Craig found his way out of addiction and despair by returning to his indigenous roots in the kitchen. His book traces the links among food, colonialism, and community, and how he found his way back home. Join us!
Below, some thoughts to contemplate this morning in advance of our 12:30 meeting: