Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin, criticized AI during an interview at the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal. According to Deadline's recap, Atwood said she had used an AI chatbot exactly once — Anthropic's Claude — and came away unimpressed.
Atwood had asked Claude about the British detective series Father Brown. She said Claude gave her the wrong answer, explaining that it had "skimmed and sampled a lot of television reviews" that typically don't reveal endings, which misled the model. "Of course, it didn't know it was lying because it's not a human being; it's a large language model," she said.
Atwood also called people who rely on AI "opportunists" looking for the easy way out, adding that humans will cheat if the method is hard to detect. She cautioned that AI users, including those using it for business, must verify its output because it makes mistakes. Her core conclusion: "the thing about AI is that it's garbage in, garbage out."