Margaret Atwood Says Anthropic’s Claude Gave Wrong Answer About Father Brown TV Series

Margaret Atwood said she used an artificial intelligence chatbot exactly once and received an incorrect answer. The author of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin spoke during an interview at the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal. The Verge reported that Atwood tested Anthropic’s Claude to obtain information about the British detective series Father Brown.

She stated that the chatbot provided the wrong answer. “Claude gave me the wrong answer, or it lied,” Atwood said. “Of course, it didn’t know it was lying because it’s not a human being; it’s a large language model.

Atwood described people who rely on AI tools as opportunists seeking an easy way out. “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.