Margaret Atwood says the problem with AI is ‘garbage in, garbage out’

Margaret Atwood onstage at Detroit Opera House on January 26, 2026 | Photo: Monica Morgan/Getty Images

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.

According 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 Father Brown and, well:

"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 a …

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