Sam Altman invited one of America’s most prolific living authors to speak to his team. What he got was a dressing-down.

Dave Eggers, the novelist, journalist, publisher of McSweeney’s, and founder of multiple education nonprofits, stood before roughly 200 OpenAI staffers and told them their flagship product is wreaking havoc on schools. According to the Financial Times, Eggers said the effect of ChatGPT on educators’ lives is “catastrophic,” arguing the tool has made every teacher’s job effectively impossible when it comes to evaluating original student work.

The case against outsourcing your voice

Eggers didn’t limit his critique to a single talk in OpenAI’s offices. In a June 2026 appearance on NPR, he expanded on the theme, warning young people against the temptation to let AI “speak for me.” He framed the widespread adoption of generative text tools as a form of “dystopian” self-silencing, where an entire generation voluntarily surrenders the very thing that makes their expression human: the struggle to find their own words.

OpenAI did not provide any comment or clarification regarding the event or the concerns Eggers raised.

Altman’s parallel universe: where AI meets crypto

While OpenAI builds language models that educators are scrambling to contain, Altman’s Worldcoin project is building biometric verification infrastructure that launched its mainnet in 2023. Worldcoin uses iris-scanning orbs to create unique digital identities, specifically designed to prove a user is human and not an AI.

The crypto market has noticed the AI narrative’s influence. Speculative tokens like OPENAI ERC and OpenAI PreStocks trade on decentralized platforms, responding to AI-related news without any endorsement or affiliation from OpenAI itself.

What this means for investors

Educational institutions worldwide are actively debating whether to ban, restrict, or integrate these tools. If the backlash crystallizes into meaningful regulation, particularly around how AI outputs are used in academic settings, it could reshape the market for AI products.

For crypto investors specifically, proof-of-personhood and digital identity tokens stand to benefit directly from the erosion of trust that generative AI creates. Projects like Worldcoin sit at this exact intersection, and their long-term value proposition strengthens every time a teacher can’t tell if a student used ChatGPT.

The speculative token ecosystem around AI companies remains highly volatile and fundamentally disconnected from the underlying businesses. Tokens trading under OpenAI-adjacent names carry no legal claim on the company’s revenue or technology. When someone like Dave Eggers generates a news cycle questioning AI’s societal value, these tokens can swing sharply, creating both risk and opportunity for short-term traders.