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
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Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale, criticized AI chatbots after testing one and finding it provided inaccurate information. When she asked Claude about a British detective series, the chatbot gave her a wrong answer because it had been trained on incomplete online data that didn't contain the show's ending. Atwood argued that AI systems are fundamentally limited by their training data, coining the phrase "garbage in, garbage out" to explain that flawed or incomplete source material produces unreliable results, and that even business users must verify AI outputs because the systems regularly make mistakes.
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