Margaret Atwood Critiques AI: Errors from the Start

Margaret Atwood Critiques AI: Errors from the Start

Margaret Atwood, the renowned author of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin, was interviewed at the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal. As is often the case at such events, the topic of AI came up, and Atwood did not hold back.

According to a summary from Deadline, Atwood stated that she had used an AI chatbot, Claude from Anthropic, just once and came away disappointed. She was looking for information about the British detective series Father Brown and explained:

"Claude gave me the wrong answer, or it lied. Of course, it didn’t know it was lying because it’s not a human; it’s a language model... It had scanned and sampled numerous TV reviews, but they never reveal the ending in online reviews, so it was misled by what it had read about the show."

She was also critical of those who rely on AI, labeling them as "opportunists" seeking an easy solution. However, as she pointed out, not all LLMs (large language models) are as good as the data they receive, and trusting a machine trained on retrieved, previously published, and potentially outdated information is not the best idea.

"Humans are not robots, but they are opportunistic, so if there’s an easy way to cheat and it’s hard to detect, people will do it... But the problem with AI is that it’s garbage in, garbage out. Even people using it for professional reasons need to verify, because it makes mistakes."