Margaret Atwood Warns AI Is “Garbage In, Garbage Out” at Portugal’s Babell Festival

In June, Margaret Atwood appeared at the inaugural Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal. While discussing her memoir *Book of Lives*, she described a single interaction with Anthropic’s Claude chatbot that gave a wrong answer to a question about the TV series *Father Brown*, using the incident to highlight reliability concerns for large language models.

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Claude, like other large language models, generates text by sampling from vast corpora of published material. Atwood, author of *The Handmaid’s Tale* and *The Blind Assassin*, noted that such systems depend on the quality of their training data. Her memoir, published late last year by Penguin, was a focal point of the festival, which runs through June 29.

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Key participants: Margaret Atwood (author), Anthropic (creator of Claude), Babell Literary and Cultural Festival (Porto, Portugal), Penguin (publisher of *Book of Lives*).

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Atwood emphasized that AI outputs reflect the data fed into them, making errors inevitable when models draw from scraped, potentially outdated sources. She argued that users—including businesses—must verify AI-generated information because the technology can produce false statements without awareness of its own inaccuracies. Her Claude anecdote served as a concrete illustration of these limitations.

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Atwood described individuals who rely on AI for shortcuts as “opportunists” seeking easy, hard-to-detect cheating. She also warned that attempts to suppress dissent in the United States could precede authoritarian measures, citing the purchase of legacy media by wealthy pro-Trump investors and the emergence of new online outlets as a counter-movement.

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• “But the thing about AI is that it’s garbage in, garbage out.” — Margaret Atwood, author

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• “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,” — Margaret Atwood, author

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• “Human beings are not robots, but they are opportunists, so 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.” — Margaret Atwood, author

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• “What’s happening in the United States right now is that they’re attempting to stifle political dissent, and as we know, that’s the lead-up to a dictatorship.” — Margaret Atwood, author

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Atwood’s remarks underscore the need for critical evaluation of AI-generated content in literary and journalistic contexts. By highlighting both technical flaws and ethical concerns, she contributes to ongoing debates about the role of large language models in creative production and information verification.

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The Babell Festival continues through June 29, offering additional panels on literature and technology.

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