Charlie Brooker, the creator of the anthology series Black Mirror, tried using AI to write an episode of the Netflix show, and it couldn’t get the job done, surprising nobody.
In an interview with Empire, Charlie Brooker—known for the futuristic yet spooky Black Mirror, as well as other satirical works—discussed giving ChatGPT AI technology a try and detailed how miserably it did at creating an episode of the Netflix show on the fly: “The first thing I did was type ‘generate Black Mirror episode,’ and it comes up with something that, at first glance, reads plausibly, but on second glance, is shit.”
When discussing what the episode did look like after ChatGPT’s hard day’s work, Brooker said that the AI technology couldn’t come up with a good idea for an episode because all it did was look up past episodes and “mush them together.” Even with some of the episodes coming across as coherent and put together, it just didn’t end up with anything original or usable. “Then if you dig a bit more deeply, you go, ‘Oh, there’s not actually any real original thought here,'” Brooker said.
Brooker’s biggest lesson learned with his time using ChatGPT? What not to do with Black Mirror in the future. “I was aware that I had written lots of episodes where someone goes, ‘Oh, I was inside a computer the whole time!'” he said. “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.”
With The Writers Guild of America on strike for the first time in 15 years, there have been a lot of discussions centred around AI technology and its ability to create pieces of art, such as written episodes of TV shows. It’s good to see that with Brooker’s experimentation, he didn’t find anything that could be used, keeping those human writers in jobs, hopefully, for decades to come.
