During an appearance at the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal, acclaimed author Margaret Atwood, known for The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin, offered a blunt critique of artificial intelligence.
Per a report from Deadline, Atwood recounted her single experience using an AI chatbot—Anthropic’s Claude—which left her unimpressed. While attempting to find specific information regarding the British detective series Father Brown, she encountered significant inaccuracies:
”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 was equally critical of those who rely heavily on these tools, describing them as “opportunists” seeking shortcuts. She emphasized that large language models (LLMs) are fundamentally limited by their training data; relying on machines fed with scraped, potentially outdated, or inaccurate information poses significant risks.
“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.”
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