Margaret Atwood says the problem with AI is ‘garbage in, garbage out’
The Handmaid’s Tale author tried Claude exactly once, and wasn’t impressed.
by Terrence O'Brien
Jun 27, 2026, 6:39 PM UTC
Terrence O'Brien is the Verge’s weekend editor. He’s covered the tech industry for over 18 years and knows a thing or two about synths.
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 unimpressed. She was looking for information about the British detective series Father Brown and, well:
”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...
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