Re:Thinking with Adam GrantMargaret Atwood on what AI can’t replace | ReThinking with Adam Grant
CHAPTERS
- 0:00 – 2:23
Atwood on AI’s limits: formula vs original voice
Adam Grant opens with AI and creativity, noting Atwood’s work has been used to train large language models. Atwood argues AI can mimic formulas and produce competent pastiche, but struggles with genuinely original, voice-driven literature.
- •AI can generate formulaic genre writing more easily than distinctive literature
- •“Garbage in, garbage out,” though training data isn’t all garbage
- •Student essays and take-home writing assignments are already disrupted
- •AI can imitate Shakespeare-style writing but not become Shakespeare
- •Original voice and quality writing remain hard for current AI
- 2:23 – 4:28
Learning style through imitation: Atwood’s graduate-school training
Atwood describes early exercises in identifying authors by stylistic fingerprints and historical period. She also recounts teaching students to guess author gender from passages—an exercise that exposed how unreliable those assumptions can be.
- •Close reading can reveal century/period, not necessarily author identity
- •Students were poor at inferring a writer’s gender from text
- •Themes/concerns don’t reliably indicate gender (especially historically)
- •Social access shaped what writers could depict (e.g., men in women’s spaces vs women barred from men’s clubs)
- 4:28 – 6:40
Pastiche in practice: the ‘literary memoir’ parody
Prompted to write a memoir “in a literary style,” Atwood satirizes the vague demand by demonstrating multiple exaggerated styles. She reads mock-heroic couplets and Gothic prose to show how ‘style’ can be performative and detachable from substance.
- •Memoir-as-list (“I wrote a book…”) would be tedious
- •‘Literary style’ is ambiguous—whose tradition and which techniques?
- •Mock-heroic couplets and Gothic flamboyance as examples of pastiche
- •Demonstrates how writers can consciously adopt and discard voices
- 6:40 – 9:50
How AI pastiche fails: dystopias, chiggers, and missing essentials
Atwood compares her own pastiche to AI imitation, arguing AI often misses the core logic of genres and real-world specifics. She shares examples where AI produced superficially Atwood-like outputs that failed on fundamental details.
- •AI can produce short ‘rip-offs’ but struggles to go somewhere truly original
- •AI-written ‘dystopia’ missed a key dystopian constraint (you can’t just leave)
- •It failed to identify what made the society oppressive—no human-made mechanism
- •Requested ‘chiggers and mud’ yielded absurd positives (‘singing chiggers’)
- •Genre understanding requires more than atmospheric word choice
- 9:50 – 11:06
Why Atwood won’t write with AI (and where it can help)
Asked whether she uses AI in writing, Atwood rejects the idea as lazy and antithetical to her work ethic. She concedes AI can assist with adjacent tasks (definitions, schedules) but warns against trust due to frequent errors.
- •Emphatic refusal to use AI for drafting: “Why would I do such a thing?”
- •Frames AI-writing as laziness; values effort and craft
- •AI can function as a reference tool (definitions, dictionaries)
- •Examples of unreliable outputs (bad mapping/location claims)
- •Advice: don’t trust AI’s confident inaccuracies
- 11:06 – 13:10
‘Hallucinations’ vs mistakes: resisting humanizing AI
Grant explores whether AI errors can be creatively generative; Atwood pushes back on the term ‘hallucinations.’ She argues the label is a rhetorical move to anthropomorphize machines, which do not have experiences—only mistakes.
- •Atwood rejects ‘hallucination’ for AI outputs: they are errors
- •Hallucinations imply lived, emotional/physiological human experience
- •AI community uses ‘hallucination’ to make AI sound human
- •Novels aren’t factual errors; they are constructed stories with plots and inner lives
- •AI still struggles with deep characterization and interiority
- 13:10 – 15:00
The real danger of AI: deepfakes and propaganda
Atwood reframes the conversation: AI’s biggest threat isn’t replacing novelists but enabling political manipulation. She predicts writers of certain commercial forms may be impacted, while readers will still seek authentic human viewpoints.
- •Primary concern: deepfakes for political propaganda
- •Most serious creative disruption may hit ad copy and some journalism
- •Decline of verbal ads already changed writing jobs
- •People value personal points of view from real humans
- •Ghostwriting precedents show ‘invented authors’ aren’t new—AI just scales it
- 15:00 – 16:32
Why write a memoir now: memory over chronology
Grant pivots to Atwood’s memoir, The Book of Lives, and her surprise at writing it. Atwood distinguishes memoir from autobiography, focusing on what is remembered rather than exhaustive documentation.
- •Atwood resisted memoir until reframing it as memory-based
- •Memoir ≠ autobiography: no need for full travel logs and chronology
- •What we remember: foolish acts, harms done to us, catastrophes, near-death moments, high points
- •Retelling can be pleasurable even if events weren’t at the time (war-story effect)
- 16:32 – 20:16
Bullying, power, and the ‘pack of cards’ realization
Atwood recounts being tormented by a trio of girls at age nine and the broader universality of childhood cruelty. She draws on Alice in Wonderland to explain the moment of seeing through intimidation—recognizing bullies’ power depends on your belief in it.
- •Bullying is common; reader letters revealed even harsher experiences
- •Atwood lacked ‘girl etiquette’ models and tended to believe what she was told
- •Alice in Wonderland metaphor: naming the threat as ‘a pack of cards’ and walking away when possible
- •Bullies’ power is contingent on victims granting legitimacy
- •Human nature is not gendered into ‘nice girls’ vs ‘cruel boys’
- 20:16 – 22:58
Forgiveness vs revenge—and a taste of ‘marginally mean’
Grant asks how to stop offenders living “rent-free” in your head. Atwood contrasts compassion/forgiveness with the temptation of payback, sharing how teenage perspective shifts reduced others’ hold over her and enabled subtle retaliations.
- •Forgiveness can remove the vengeful presence from your mind
- •Mandela as an example of choosing release over revenge
- •Revenge is tempting; Atwood tries (imperfectly) to resist indulgence
- •Power can shift: realizing control no longer resides in the tormentor
- •Anecdote of using fear (cemetery/mausoleum) as ‘marginally mean’ leverage
- 22:58 – 25:53
Heroes, monsters, and why you should ‘pray’ not to be a hero
Atwood elaborates on a provocative idea: heroes require monsters, but monsters don’t need heroes. She connects mythic dragon-slaying logic to real-world resistance movements and the costs of ‘heroic’ opportunities.
- •To be celebrated as a hero, you need a monster to defeat
- •Monsters typically don’t welcome heroes unless masochistic
- •Polish Resistance warning: “Pray that you will never have the opportunity to be a hero”
- •Heroic moments imply danger and many casualties before ‘the Beowulf’ arrives
- •Revisits ‘enemies’ as often being people who see her as their enemy (politics, advocacy)
- 25:53 – 32:10
Book bans and forbidden reading: the unburnable Handmaid’s Tale and the lure of taboo
Grant raises book bans and cites evidence that bans often fail and may correlate with positive civic outcomes. Atwood argues libraries and librarians raise achievement, and shares stories showing how prohibition can make literature irresistible and formative.
- •Unburnable The Handmaid’s Tale stunt highlights the absurdity of censorship
- •Bans can increase curiosity; exposure doesn’t predict worse grades/behavior in cited study
- •School libraries correlate with better academic outcomes
- •Story: being warned off Joyce’s Ulysses created a lifelong reader
- •Forbidden paperbacks smuggled classics via sensational covers; reading expands the unknown
- 32:10 – 38:18
Lightning round: advice, dinner guests, and rethinking politics
In rapid-fire questions, Atwood shares the worst advice she received and her core writing tip: do the work. She drafts a dinner party guest list based on conversational ability and reflects on uncertainty about political destabilization tactics.
- •Worst writing advice: abandon writing and “find a nice man and marry him”
- •Best tip: you must put in the hours and actually write—like practicing piano
- •Dream dinner party prioritized talkers (Oscar Wilde, Nancy Mitford; doubts about Emily Brontë and Samuel Johnson)
- •What she’s rethinking: interpreting the Trump era’s next moves (strategy vs erratic destabilization)
- •Atwood’s persona: fearlessness about disagreeing; ‘uncancelable’ due to career stage
- 38:18 – 43:01
Human nature, moral arguments, and closing on book-tour questions
Atwood asks Grant about a forensic psychiatrist’s warning about what ‘walks among us,’ prompting a nuanced discussion: kindness is common, but opportunism exists too. They end with playful debates about everyday ‘moral’ disputes and the odd questions she hopes (not) to get on tour.
- •Biased samples can distort views of humanity; default response to tragedy is often kindness
- •Humans contain extremes; most live in the middle with varying moral definitions
- •Comic ‘moral’ battlegrounds: toilet paper orientation, tea milk order, cereal vs milk first
- •Book-tour Qs: unusual reader observations (eggs, glass jars) and her hair
- •Warm closing: Atwood as an international literary treasure
