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

Margaret Atwood said at a literary festival in Portugal that she tried Anthropic's Claude once and found it unreliable after it gave her a wrong answer about the British detective series Father Brown. She argued the core problem with AI is garbage in, garbage out, reflecting concerns about models producing confident but inaccurate responses.

Atwood's comments highlight a persistent trust gap for generative AI, especially among writers and cultural figures who see factual reliability as essential. The episode reinforces the trend that AI adoption depends not just on capability, but on transparency, sourcing, and user confidence in outputs.