Margaret Atwood says the problem with AI is ‘garbage in, garbage out’

玛格丽特·阿特伍德：人工智能的问题在于“垃圾进，垃圾出”

The Handmaid’s Tale author tried Claude exactly once, and wasn’t impressed. 《使女的故事》作者只试用过一次 Claude，但印象并不好。

Margaret 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. 玛格丽特·阿特伍德（Margaret Atwood）是《使女的故事》和《盲刺客》的著名作者，她在葡萄牙波尔图举行的巴贝尔文学与文化节（Babell Literary and Cultural Festival）上接受了采访。正如这类活动中常有的情况，人工智能的话题被提了出来，阿特伍德对此直言不讳。

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: 据《Deadline》的报道摘要，阿特伍德表示她只使用过一次人工智能聊天机器人——Anthropic 公司的 Claude，但体验并不理想。当时她正在查找关于英国侦探剧《布朗神父》（Father Brown）的信息，结果如下：

“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.” “Claude 给出了错误的答案，或者说它撒了谎。当然，它并不知道自己在撒谎，因为它不是人类，它只是一个大型语言模型……它浏览并采样了大量的电视评论，但网络评论通常不会剧透结局，所以它被自己读到的关于这部剧的内容误导了。”

She didn’t have particularly kind words for the people who rely on AI either, calling them “opportunists” looking for the easy way out. But of course, as she pointed out, all LLMs are only as good as the data they’re fed, and putting your faith in a machine trained on scraped, previously published, and possibly out-of-date information isn’t the best idea. 对于那些依赖人工智能的人，她也没有什么好话，称他们为寻找捷径的“机会主义者”。但正如她所指出的，所有大语言模型的质量都取决于输入的数据，而盲目信任一台基于抓取、过往发布且可能过时的信息训练出来的机器，并不是什么好主意。

“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.” “人类不是机器人，但人类是机会主义者，所以如果有一种容易作弊且难以被发现的方法，人们就会去做……但人工智能的问题在于‘垃圾进，垃圾出’。即使是出于商业目的使用它的人，也必须对其进行核查，因为它会犯错。”