Margaret Atwood, the acclaimed writer behind The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin, spoke at the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal. Inevitably, the conversation turned to artificial intelligence — and Atwood offered a characteristically blunt assessment.
As Deadline’s write-up noted, Atwood said she has tried an AI chatbot only once: Anthropic’s Claude. The experience, she suggested, did little to inspire confidence. She had asked it for details about the British detective drama Father Brown, and the result was not what she had hoped for:
“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 similarly unsparing about those who lean heavily on AI tools, describing such users as “opportunists” seeking a shortcut. Her broader point was that large language models can only reflect the material used to train them — much of it scraped from existing publications, potentially incomplete, misleading, or no longer current.
“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.”
