- ‘Black Mirror’ creator Charlie Brooker tried to write an episode with ChatGPT, per Empire.
- The writer says the AI-generated episode ‘reads plausibly,’ but ‘is shit’ on second glance.
- It did inspire him to “chuck out any sense of what I think a ‘Black Mirror’ episode is.”
Ever since ChatGPT‘s release in November, there’s been endless talk about AI coming for writers’ jobs.
While there’s nothing more “Black Mirror”-esque than that, the British anthology TV series’ creator Charlie Brooker sounds hopeful that the OpenAI chatbot doesn’t have what it takes to write a real episode.
“I’ve toyed around with ChatGPT a bit,” Brooker told Empire, a British film magazine. The first thing he tried was to type “generate ‘Black Mirror’ episode,” but the results were lackluster.
“It comes up with something that, at first glance, reads plausibly, but on second glance, is shit,” said Brooker to Empire. “Because all it’s done is look up all the synopses of ‘Black Mirror’ episodes, and sort of mush them together.”
“Then if you dig a bit more deeply you go, ‘Oh, there’s not actually any real original thought here,'” said the writer.
But Brooker did learn a useful lesson during his session on ChatGPT, it showed him what not to do in the future, per Empire.
“I was aware that I had written lots of episodes where someone goes ‘Oh, I was inside a computer the whole time!'” said Brooker to Empire.
“So I thought, ‘I’m just going to chuck out any sense of what I think a ‘Black Mirror’ episode is.’ There’s no point in having an anthology show if you can’t break your own rules. Just a sort of nice, cold glass of water in the face,” Brooker said, per Empire.
Regarding the three-year lag between seasons five and six, Brooker wasn’t confident that dystopian stories would have been appropriate during the height of the pandemic. In an interview with Radio Times in 2020, Brooker noted: “At the moment, I don’t know what stomach there would be for stories about societies falling apart”
Season six of “Black Mirror” will include elements that he “previously sworn blind the show would never do,” said Brooker per Netflix.
The five-episode season is slated to premiere on June 15 with its first episode “Joan is Awful”, and will be featuring a slew of talented actors such as Salma Hayek Pinault, Michael Cera, and Zazie Beetz, per Netflix.
