Margaret Atwood on AI: 'Garbage in, garbage out'

Margaret Atwood, the acclaimed author of 'The Handmaid’s Tale' and 'The Blind Assassin', shared her critical views on artificial intelligence during the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal. According to Deadline’s recap, Atwood revealed she had used an AI chatbot exactly once – Anthropic’s Claude.

She was looking for information about the British detective series 'Father Brown', but Claude gave her the wrong answer. 'It 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,' she said.

Atwood also had harsh words for people who rely on AI, calling them 'opportunists' looking for an easy way out. She emphasized that all large language models are only as good as the data they are trained on, and trusting a machine trained on scraped, published, and possibly outdated information is unwise.

'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,' Atwood added.