Margaret Atwood says AI problem is ‘garbage in, garbage out’

Maraget Atwood, biographer of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Killerwas interviewed as part of the Babell Literature and Culture Festival in Porto, Portugal. As is often the case with these things, the subject of AI came up, and Atwood didn’t say a word.

According to The last day of going back, Atwood said she used an AI chatbot exactly once, Anthropic’s Claude, and left unimpressed. He was looking for information on a list of British explorers Father Brown and, well:

“Claude gave me the wrong answer, or he lied. Yes, he did not know that he was lying because he is not a person; he is a great example of language… It had analyzed and tried many comments on the television, but they did not give their end to the criticism on the Internet, so they were misled by the things they read about the show.”

He didn’t have particularly kind words for people who rely on AI, calling them “opportunists” who want an easy way out. But, as he said, all LLMs are only as good as what they are fed, and putting your faith in machine learning on manuscripts, pre-printed, and perhaps outdated knowledge is not a very good idea.

“Humans are not robots, but they are opportunists, so if there is an easy way to cheat and hard to detect, people will do it… But the thing about AI is that it’s garbage, garbage out there.