Margaret Atwood: AI’s problem is ‘garbage in, garbage out’
▼ Summary
– Margaret Atwood was interviewed at the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal, where she discussed AI.
– Atwood used Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot once and was unimpressed by the experience.
– She asked Claude for information about the British detective series *Father Brown*, but it gave her a wrong answer.
The celebrated author of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin recently took a sharp stance on artificial intelligence during an appearance at the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal. As is increasingly common at such events, the conversation turned to AI, and Margaret Atwood did not hold back.
According to a recap from Deadline, Atwood admitted she had used an AI chatbot only once, turning to Anthropic’s Claude for a simple query about the British detective series Father Brown. The result, she said, was deeply flawed.
“Claude gave me the wrong answer, or it lied,” Atwood explained. “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 a…” The author’s critique boiled down to a classic computing adage: “garbage in, garbage out.” She argued that the fundamental problem with AI systems is that they rely on vast, unvetted datasets, producing outputs that are often inaccurate or misleading without any awareness of their errors.
Atwood’s comments highlight a growing skepticism among cultural figures about the reliability and trustworthiness of generative AI, even as the technology becomes more pervasive. Her blunt assessment reinforces the idea that without high-quality, human-curated input, these tools will continue to generate flawed results.
(Source: The Verge)
