Margaret Atwood says the problem with AI is “garbage in, garbage out.”

Margit Atwood, author The Handmaid’s Tale and The blind killerHe was interviewed as part of the Babylon Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal. As is often the case in these matters, the question of artificial intelligence came up, and Atwood wasn’t at a loss for words.

according to Deadline In summary, Atwood said she used an AI chatbot exactly once, Anthropic’s Claude, and she didn’t like it. She was looking for information about the British detective series Father Brown And well:

“Claude gave me the wrong answer, or he lied. Of course, he didn’t know he was lying because he’s not human; it’s a big linguistic model… He reviewed and sampled a lot of TV reviews, but they never revealed the ending in the online reviews, so they were misled by the things they read about the show.”

She didn’t have particularly kind words for people who rely on AI either, describing them as “opportunists” looking for the easy way out. But of course, as she points out, all MBAs are only as good as the data they’re fed, and putting your trust in a machine that’s been trained on deleted, previously published, and possibly outdated information isn’t the best idea.

“Humans are not robots, but they are opportunists, so if there is an easy way to cheat that is hard to detect, people will do it… But the thing about AI is that it is just garbage. Even people who use it for commercial reasons have to check it because it makes mistakes.”