Margaret Atwood tried Claude once. She wasn’t impressed.
The Handmaid’s Tale author was interviewed at the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal, where the topic of AI came up. She’d used Anthropic’s Claude exactly once, looking for information about the British detective series Father Brown. It didn’t go well.
“Claude gave me the wrong answer, or it lied,” Atwood said. “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.”
She didn’t have kind words for people who lean on AI either, calling them “opportunists” looking for shortcuts. But she pointed out that all large language models are only as good as what they’re trained on — and trusting a machine trained on scraped, possibly outdated information isn’t a great strategy.
“Human beings are not robots, but they are opportunists. 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.”
Atwood’s take is refreshingly blunt in a tech landscape full of hype. Sometimes the best AI critic is someone who just wanted to know who the killer was in Father Brown.
