{"id":521662,"date":"2026-06-27T19:40:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-27T19:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/521662\/"},"modified":"2026-06-27T19:40:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T19:40:08","slug":"margaret-atwood-talks-ai-u-s-politics-censorship-at-babell-fest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/521662\/","title":{"rendered":"Margaret Atwood Talks AI, U.S. Politics & Censorship At Babell Fest"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\u201cThe thing about AI<\/a> is that it\u2019s garbage in, garbage out,\u201d Margaret Atwood<\/a> concluded this afternoon in her famously sardonic tone during a career Q&A at the inaugural Babell Literary and Cultural Festival<\/a> in Porto, Portugal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe legendary Canadian author was in Portugal\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAtwood told the audience that she had used an AI model once in her life, Anthropic\u2019s Claude. But it wasn\u2019t to assist with her writing. Instead, Atwood joked that she was trying to find out a spoiler about the British detective series Father Brown.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cClaude gave me the wrong answer, or it lied. Of course, it didn\u2019t know it was lying because it\u2019s not a human being; it\u2019s a large language model,\u201d Atwood said. \u201cIt 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAtwood ended her AI anecdote by saying the technology, and the way large language models are developed through scraping through previously published works, simply isn\u2019t reliable enough for humans to depend on.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHuman beings are not robots, but they are opportunists, so if there\u2019s an easy way to cheat and it\u2019s hard to detect, people will do it,\u201d she said. \u201cBut the thing about AI is that it\u2019s garbage in, garbage out. Even people who use it for business reasons have to check it because it makes mistakes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tElsewhere during the talk, Atwood was asked about censorship, which she casually described as \u201ca very old story in world history.\u201d Across her decades-long career, Atwood\u2019s 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\u2019s Handmaid\u2019s Tale was included on a list published by PEN America of the most-banned books in school districts across the United States.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s a good sales gimmick,\u201d Atwood joked when asked about being censored by bans. \u201cDon\u2019t read this book. It\u2019s too hot to read. And then people rush off to buy it and think, where are the depraved parts?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAtwood 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhat\u2019s happening in the United States right now is that they\u2019re attempting to stifle political dissent, and as we know, that\u2019s the lead-up to a dictatorship. Luckily, the Americans aren\u2019t buying it,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAnd we don\u2019t have a state media over there yet, although the billionaire pro-Trumpers are buying up legacy television stations and newspapers. That\u2019s what they\u2019re 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\u2019s something to be watched.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBack 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI never make such choices because the others will hear about it and they\u2019ll get their revenge,\u201d she joked. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe Babell Literary and Cultural Festival runs until June 29.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe thing about AI is that it\u2019s garbage in, garbage out,\u201d Margaret Atwood concluded this afternoon in her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":521663,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,222349,61,60,97463,80],"class_list":["post-521662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-babell-literary-and-cultural-festival","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-margaret-atwood","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521662\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/521663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}