Margaret Atwood, the acclaimed author of *The Handmaid’s Tale*, recently shared her less-than-favorable experience with an AI chatbot, having used it just once and come away distinctly unimpressed.
During an interview at the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal, the topic of artificial intelligence inevitably arose. Atwood, known for her forthrightness, did not hold back her opinions on the matter.
As reported by *Deadline*, Atwood recounted her single interaction with an AI chatbot, specifically Anthropic’s Claude. Her objective was to find information about the British detective series *Father Brown*. Her findings, however, fell short of expectations:
“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 extended her critique beyond the technology itself, also expressing reservations about individuals who rely on AI, labeling them as “opportunists” seeking convenience. She underscored that the efficacy of all large language models is directly tied to the quality of the data they are trained on, cautioning against placing trust in systems built on scraped, previously published, and potentially outdated information.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.”
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