{"slug": "margaret-atwood-says-the-problem-with-ai-is-garbage-in-garbage-out", "title": "Margaret Atwood says the problem with AI is ‘garbage in, garbage out’", "summary": "Author Margaret Atwood criticized AI chatbots as unreliable, citing her experience with Anthropic's Claude giving incorrect information about a TV show. She warned that AI outputs are only as good as their training data, calling the technology 'garbage in, garbage out' and labeling users who rely on it as 'opportunists.'", "body_md": "Maraget Atwood, the storied author of *The Handmaid’s Tale* and *The Blind Assassin*, was interviewed as part of the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal. As it usually does at these things, the issue of AI came up, and Atwood didn’t mince words.\n\n# Margaret Atwood says the problem with AI is ‘garbage in, garbage out’\n\nThe Handmaid’s Tale author tried Claude exactly once, and wasn’t impressed.\n\nThe Handmaid’s Tale author tried Claude exactly once, and wasn’t impressed.\n\nAccording to * Deadline’s* recap, Atwood said she’d used an AI chatbot exactly once, Anthropic’s Claude, and came away unimpressed. She was looking for information about the British detective series\n\n*Father Brown*and, well:\n\n”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.”\n\nShe didn’t have particularly kind words for the people who rely on AI either, calling them “opportunists” looking for the easy way out. But of course, as she pointed out, all LLMs are only as good as the data they’re fed, and putting your faith in a machine trained on scraped, previously published, and possibly out-of-date information isn’t the best idea.\n\n“Human beings are not robots, but they are opportunists, so if there’s an easy way to cheat and it’s hard to detect, people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.”\n\n**Follow topics and authors** from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/margaret-atwood-says-the-problem-with-ai-is-garbage-in-garbage-out", "canonical_source": "https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/958715/margaret-atwood-ai-problem-garbage-in-garbage-out", "published_at": "2026-06-27 18:39:32+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-27 19:44:20.814992+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["large-language-models", "ai-ethics", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Margaret Atwood", "Anthropic", "Claude", "The Handmaid's Tale", "The Blind Assassin", "Babell Literary and Cultural Festival", "Deadline"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/margaret-atwood-says-the-problem-with-ai-is-garbage-in-garbage-out", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/margaret-atwood-says-the-problem-with-ai-is-garbage-in-garbage-out.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/margaret-atwood-says-the-problem-with-ai-is-garbage-in-garbage-out.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/margaret-atwood-says-the-problem-with-ai-is-garbage-in-garbage-out.jsonld"}}