At Dave Eggers’ suggestion, we’re starting the interview by drawing a live model together. The novelist dropped out of art school but has been drawing for decades, and his new book is set in the art world. Our model, Prudence, stands in front of us with her palms open, naked except for a pair of black knee-high socks. This is, unsurprisingly, a first for me in an interview. Eggers shows me how to hold my pencil at arm’s length and use my thumb to measure Prudence’s proportions. Since the pandemic, he’s been organizing regular life-drawing sessions in the book-lined offices of McSweeney’s, the publishing house and literary journal he founded in San Francisco in 1998. He loves the element of chance in figure drawing—you never know which sketch will turn out well—and believes it helps build empathy.
“How so?” asks Prudence, helpfully interviewing him for me, since I’ve been thrown off my game. “I feel like in three hours of drawing a person, you learn so much about them, and there’s so much affection that comes from carefully trying to get them right,” he says.
Eggers is 56 and gives off rock-dad vibes with his gray curly hair, black graphic T-shirt and jeans, and brown lace-up boots. He has written over a dozen novels, half a dozen nonfiction books, as well as children’s books and art books, and has launched a huge number of nonprofits over the years, many aimed at reducing barriers to literature and the arts. When asked how he manages all of this, Eggers is modest: he says, for example, that he likes to hand over leadership as soon as he can. His most recent project is Art + Water, an arts center on the San Francisco waterfront modeled on a traditional artists’ studio. In exchange for free studio space, 10 established artists will mentor and teach 20 local emerging artists. The program will be free to attend. In the US, a master of fine arts (MFA) degree can easily cost $100,000 a year, an “absurd” price, says Eggers, that creates an “arts industrial complex that makes everyone miserable.” “There’s nothing that makes me crazier than an economic barrier to a creative writing class or a drawing class,” he says.
After we finish drawing, we walk through the Narnia-style wardrobe that separates the McSweeney’s offices from the International Library of Youth Writing at the front of the building. The library showcases books written by children who attended the international network of writing centers that Eggers helped found almost 25 years ago. The original center, 826 Valencia, is across the street, inside a pirate-supply shop, because local planning laws required the building to be used as commercial space, and Eggers believes children need more whimsy in their lives.
We settle into a pair of large, mismatched armchairs. Local school kids can come to the library to read or write, with a pen or typewriter, or make their own zines. There are oriental rugs on the floor, and on the wall, a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, but with her nails painted fuchsia and her head replaced by a cartoon pink dog. Behind a grandfather clock, a hidden door reveals a Marie Antoinette-style boudoir, where students can browse replicas of famous writers’ early works. There’s a pink chest of tiny drawers, each one a mailbox for a neighborhood kid, who send each other letters and often receive jokes and other messages from the library’s curator. The children love it. “It’s not like a digital mailbox, it’s a box with a real person who puts a letter in every day,” he says. “If you give them a real, tangible choice, they will always choose the person, the typewriter, the tactility, instead of another screen. But we assume they want more screens, and we give them more screens, and we serve nobody. It’s just a tragedy.”
Eggers pulls out a pamphlet in which a professionalAn illustrator has brought to life a story created by a group of children, set in “the fluffy pizza beetle desert of doom.” He points out, with delight, that many of the books in this room are “bonkers.” “We don’t question the weirdness, as long as it’s original,” he says. “That’s the only requirement—it can’t be about, you know, SpongeBob or something. It has to come from their own ideas.” After working with children for over twenty years, Eggers thought he had seen every educational challenge. Then AI entered the classrooms. “The AI challenge is more than just an existential one. Every time I think I’m going to talk to someone who would never use AI in any form, I find there’s this very blurry line. For example, a smart 10-year-old will say, ‘Well, I don’t use it to write, I just use it to generate ideas,’ which is far, far worse.”
“Once you have a machine think for you and write for you, you’re cooked as a species.”
When he hears stories like that, he likes to remind students of their uniqueness. “You’re one of a kind,” he’ll say. “You’re unprecedented in the entire history of humanity. Only you have your brain. Only you can think what you think. Only you can tell a story in your own way. Why would you give that up to a machine?” Eggers’s voice, usually quiet and almost monotone, rises as he gets into his topic. “Once you have a machine think for you and write for you, you’re cooked as a species. That’s it. That’s the worst dystopian outcome there could ever be,” he says. He can’t think of anything worse than “the idea of us willingly, without any ruler telling us to, saying, ‘I think my voice would be better expressed by a thoughtless machine that has plagiarized all the world’s authors and come up with this terrible soup of bad writing.'”
Despite the discouraging news about AI-written books and reviews, Eggers believes that eventually there will be a backlash, similar to the growing resistance to giving teenagers smartphones and social media access. Most teachers, he suspects, understand the problem with technology in schools. The issue comes from policymakers. He mentions a speech where US Education Secretary Linda McMahon talks about the benefits of introducing AI into schools, even for children as young as five, except she keeps referring to AI as “A-one.” “This is who we have leading the Department of Education,” he complains. “We’re in such a ridiculous place right now…”
Eggers and his wife, writer Vendela Vida, are part of two class action lawsuits against Anthropic over the AI company’s unauthorized use of their books to train large language models. “I guarantee you they didn’t even think they were stealing anything because to them it’s just ‘content,'” he says. Content is the “world’s worst word,” he adds, because it dehumanizes writing and suggests “it has no real value on its own, and it doesn’t matter if humans made it or not.”
Eggers’s writing is often very politically engaged. His nonfiction books, he says, “all started with outrage and just being shocked by some recent moment in American history and wanting to shed light on it.” For example, The Monk of Mokha is a story about immigration and the American dream, following a Yemeni man who hopes to revive the ancient art of Yemeni coffee. Zeitoun tells the story of a Syrian-American businessman who helps his neighbors during Hurricane Katrina and is then wrongly accused of terrorism. It later faced criticism for oversimplifying its hero, who was eventually imprisoned for stalking his ex-wife.
When he studied journalism at the University of Illinois, he tells me, his professors—”hardcore old Chicago”—The newspaper guys warned the class that “no one will get better than a B-minus because you don’t deserve it—there’s no chance you’ll do work that’s better than that.” He talks about the “slog” of writing nonfiction, the challenge of fact-checking every date and detail. He says he has so many unwritten stories from reporting trips that he can’t bring himself to write them. “Fiction isn’t pure joy, but it’s infinitely more fun,” he says.
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Bonnet Girl. Illustration: Dave Eggers
He has written two dystopian novels, The Circle (2013) and The Every (2021), about a monopolistic big tech company trying to take over every part of human life. Somehow, reality seems to outdo his imagination. In The Every, the president communicates with emojis instead of right-wing memes, and AI is used to clean up novels rather than write them from scratch. He was recently invited by Sam Altman of OpenAI to speak on campus about AI-written novels. To everyone’s credit, Eggers says it was an interesting, open conversation. “It was actually a really nice afternoon, because what we always forget is that the crazy illusions of a few people at the very top aren’t always shared by the regular employees… at least some of the people working there do want to be told what’s right and wrong,” he says. “But I definitely had to give them the bad news… there’s no such thing as AI art. Only humans can create art.” At best, what a machine can produce is just “computer-generated imagery.”
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When Eggers’s phone rings mid-interview, he pulls out an old-fashioned flip phone. He writes first drafts by hand and then transfers them to a Mac computer from 1998 that has never been connected to the internet and is now held together with duct tape. He has never seen the appeal of social media—”I’ve never seen Facebook. Like, I don’t know what exactly happens on Facebook,” he says—but ESPN sports news and watching old concerts on YouTube are huge temptations. “A Kate Bush show from 1981—that’s where I waste my time… so the last time I was online, I watched a two-and-a-half-hour Sinéad O’Connor concert.” He didn’t have internet at home until he had to install it during the pandemic. That change means he now writes on a boat in San Francisco Bay instead of in his garage, “to escape the internet.” On his boat, he has no phone reception, and the only interruptions are passing fishermen and the occasional porpoise or harbor seal.
Eggers was born in Boston and raised in Chicago, where his mother worked as a teacher and his father was a lawyer. He burst onto the literary scene in 2000 with his tragicomic memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It tells the story of how, after both his parents died of cancer within weeks of each other, Eggers became a parent to his eight-year-old brother, Toph, at age 21. A year after the book was published, his sister Beth killed herself. Reports suggest he later became estranged from Toph. In a 2010 Guardian interview, he called the memoir an “aberration.” He rarely gives interviews, doesn’t like using the first-person “I” in his writing, and won’t talk about this extremely painful chapter of his life anymore. Two people warned me not to go there, and whenever our conversation gets close to personal topics, he becomes visibly uncomfortable. Today, only Prudence is baring everything.
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826 ValValencia Street in San Francisco is home to the writing center for young authors that Eggers co-founded in 2002. He started working on his new novel, Contrapposto, about 20 years ago. As he usually does, he began jotting down notes for a story set in the art world on random scraps of copy paper, which slowly piled up in a box. The novel spans six decades and follows the friendship—and a romance that never quite works out—between Cricket and Olympia. They meet as children when Olympia, a very mature 10-year-old, hires Cricket, a shy, art-loving nine-year-old, to write elaborate, pornographic graffiti on the playground. This becomes the first of many artistic partnerships they share. Normally, it takes about five years for a box of notes to turn into a book, but Eggers says it wasn’t until he turned 50 that he realized he could write a story like Contrapposto. Why? Because people don’t change much. “Most of my friends I’ve had since first or second grade, and none of us changed much. We have the exact same relationship,” he says.
I wondered if Cricket was based on Eggers, but he quickly dismisses that. It’s true he loved drawing as a kid, but he was an “active, restless child” who hung out with all the troublemakers. It’s also true he briefly studied art at his local state university and once interned at a snobby gallery that didn’t get a single visitor for an entire week. But the similarities end there. Unlike Cricket, who can’t make a living from art because he refuses to compromise and can’t meet deadlines, Eggers is practical out of necessity. He sells prints of his artwork—like drawings of animals with funny captions, such as a sad-looking bear under the words “Oh God the beauty will kill me”—to pay the rent for the library, and he feels satisfied hitting his monthly goals.
One theme that runs through Contrapposto is the tricky link between talent and success. One character points out that the best guitarist you’ll ever see is probably playing in a Journey cover band in Reno—”which I’ve seen, you know,” Eggers says. “Best guitarist I ever saw was in Reno in some bar.” It’s not just about a lack of opportunity. Sometimes people are talented but don’t have the right ideas, he says. Other times, their skill isn’t valued for strange reasons—for example, he finds it odd that we don’t appreciate street artists who draw portraits for tourists. “I’m amazed when I see some of them, what they can do,” he says.
Before I leave, we flip through our sketches one more time. He says nice things about my work, because that’s the kind of thing he always does for aspiring artists. There’s one drawing of his he thinks he’ll keep. It’s a sketch of Prudence, facing away from us, playfully pulling on the end of one of her dark braids. The image feels full of motion: you can almost sense Prudence tugging her hair. He captures a sense of looseness while staying completely in control. Contrapposto by Dave Eggers is published by Canongate on 2 July. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on Dave Eggers quote covering different angles and levels of understanding
BeginnerLevel Questions
Q Who is Dave Eggers and why should I care what he says about AI
A Hes a famous author who often writes about technology and society Hes not a tech CEO but a storyteller who warns about how tech can control our lives
Q What does done for as a species actually mean
A He means that if we let AI do our thinking and writing for us humans will stop being creative critical and unique Wed lose what makes us human
Q Is he saying we shouldnt use AI at all
A Not exactly Hes warning against relying on AI to think for us Using it as a tool is fine letting it replace our own brainpower is the danger
Q Isnt this just a dramatic exaggeration
A Many people think so But Eggers is pointing out a slippery slope if we stop practicing thinking and writing we lose those skills and then we become dependent on machines
IntermediateLevel Questions
Q How is this different from using a calculator or spellcheck
A Calculators do math that we cant do quickly Spellcheck fixes typos But AI writing tools can generate whole ideas and sentences That replaces the process of thinking not just the mechanics
Q Does this apply to all AI or just writing tools
A He specifically mentions thinking and writing so it applies to generative AI But the same logic could apply to AI that makes decisions for us
Q Whats the worstcase scenario hes imagining
A A world where people cant form original thoughts write clearly or solve problems without asking a machine We become passive consumers of machinegenerated content losing our voice and agency
Q Isnt AI writing already better than most peoples writing
