“The thing about AI is that it’s garbage in, garbage out,” Margaret Atwood concluded this afternoon in her famously sardonic tone during a career Q&A at the inaugural Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal. 

The legendary Canadian author was in Portugal’s second city primarily to discuss her memoir, Book of Lives, which was published late last year by Penguin, but the discussion, as is often the case with Atwood, was wide-ranging and, naturally, found its way to the topic of Artificial Intelligence. 

Atwood told the audience that she had used an AI model once in her life, Anthropic’s Claude. But it wasn’t to assist with her writing. Instead, Atwood joked that she was trying to find out a spoiler about the British detective series Father Brown.

“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,” Atwood said. “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.” 

Atwood ended her AI anecdote by saying the technology, and the way large language models are developed through scraping through previously published works, simply isn’t reliable enough for humans to depend on. 

“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,” she said. “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.”

Elsewhere during the talk, Atwood was asked about censorship, which she casually described as “a very old story in world history.” Across her decades-long career, Atwood’s books have consistently been described as controversial or explicit for their raw and inventive depictions of power, gender, and politics. As a result, Atwood has frequently been the target of political book bans. Last year, Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale was included on a list published by PEN America of the most-banned books in school districts across the United States. 

“It’s a good sales gimmick,” Atwood joked when asked about being censored by bans. “Don’t read this book. It’s too hot to read. And then people rush off to buy it and think, where are the depraved parts?” 

Atwood said she is largely able to avoid direct attempts to censor her work because she lives in Canada, which she described as mostly dedicated to freedom of speech and thought. However, she noted that the current political landscape in the United States is particularly troubling.   

“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. Luckily, the Americans aren’t buying it,” she said. 

“And we don’t have a state media over there yet, although the billionaire pro-Trumpers are buying up legacy television stations and newspapers. That’s what they’re trying to do. But there is, however, a counter movement that is bringing the establishment of new media and outlets with large distribution online. It’s something to be watched.”

Back on the topic of literature, the session concluded with Atwood being asked to pick her favorite book that she has authored. Her answer was definitive, but playful, as ever. 

“I never make such choices because the others will hear about it and they’ll get their revenge,” she joked.

The Babell Literary and Cultural Festival runs until June 29.