AI
Margaret Atwood says the problem with AI is ‘garbage in, garbage out’
During an interview at the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal, author Margaret Atwood shared her critical view of AI.
Key takeaways
- Claude gave the wrong answer or lied about the TV show Father Brown because it was misled by online reviews that hide endings.
- AI is "garbage in, garbage out" because LLMs are only as good as the scraped, previously published, and possibly out-of-date data they are fed.
- People who rely on AI are "opportunists" looking for an easy way to cheat.
- Even people who use AI for business reasons must check its output because it makes mistakes.
During an interview at the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal, author Margaret Atwood shared her critical view of AI. She recounted trying Anthropic's Claude chatbot exactly once to find information about the British detective series Father Brown, only for the model to give her a wrong answer because it was misled by online television reviews that did not reveal the ending. Atwood characterized AI as "garbage in, garbage out" and labeled people who rely on it to cheat as "opportunists."
In their words
“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...”
“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.”
By the numbers
- 1x
- Number of times Margaret Atwood tried Claude
Turn stories like this into views
Ravenclip finds the AI news, makes the video, and posts it before attention moves on.
Common questions
- What happened with Margaret Atwood?
- Claude gave the wrong answer or lied about the TV show Father Brown because it was misled by online reviews that hide endings.
- Where can I read the original report?
- Read the full report at the_verge.
