PORTO — Author Margaret Atwood discussed her limited use of artificial intelligence and characterized reliance on AI as cheating during an interview at the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal.

Atwood stated she used Anthropic's Claude AI chatbot one time to search for information about the British detective series Father Brown. She reported that the tool provided an incorrect answer.

"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... 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 said.

Atwood described individuals who depend on AI as opportunists. "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... 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," she said.