Margaret Atwood Highlights AI’s Flaw: “Garbage In, Garbage Out”

Margaret Atwood, the acclaimed author behind works like The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin, recently shared her thoughts on AI during an interview at the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal. As is often the case in discussions like these, the topic of artificial intelligence emerged, and Atwood was candid in her critique.

She recounted her experience using an AI chatbot, specifically Anthropic’s Claude, just once, and found it lacking. Seeking information about the British detective series Father Brown, she was disappointed with the response she received:
> “Claude gave me the wrong answer, or it lied. Of course, it didn’t know it was lying because it’s not a human being; it’s a large language model… It had skimmed and sampled a lot of television reviews, but they never give away the ending in online criticism, so it was misled by the things it had read about the show.”

Atwood also expressed her disdain for those who depend on AI, labeling them as “opportunists” looking for shortcuts. She emphasized that all large language models are only as reliable as the data they are trained on, cautioning against placing trust in machines that rely on potentially outdated or scraped information.
> “Human beings are not robots, but they are opportunists, so if there’s an easy way to cheat and it’s hard to detect, people will do it… But the thing about AI is that it’s garbage in, garbage out. Even people who use it for business reasons have to check it because it makes mistakes.”