Margaret Atwood Warns AI Is 'Garbage In, Garbage Out' at 3-Day Porto Festival
Updated
Updated · Deadline · Jun 27
Margaret Atwood Warns AI Is 'Garbage In, Garbage Out' at 3-Day Porto Festival
3 articles · Updated · Deadline · Jun 27
Summary
At Porto’s inaugural Babell festival, Margaret Atwood said AI is not reliable enough to depend on after Anthropic’s Claude gave her a wrong spoiler for the TV series “Father Brown.”
Atwood said the chatbot had sampled reviews that avoided the ending, using the anecdote to argue that large language models inherit flawed source material and still need human checking.
On censorship, Atwood called book bans an old story and joked they can boost sales; PEN America listed “The Handmaid’s Tale” among the most-banned U.S. school books last year.
The Canadian author also said the current U.S. climate is trying to stifle political dissent, warning that billionaire pro-Trump buyers of legacy media are being countered by new online outlets.
Atwood was in Portugal mainly to discuss her 2025 memoir “Book of Lives”; the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival runs through June 29.