Since ChatGPT’s release in November, there has been endless talk about AI coming for writers’ jobs. The British anthology TV series “Black Mirror” has a creator named Charlie Brooker who sounds hopeful that the OpenAI chatbot lacks the ability to write a real episode.
Brooker wasn’t confident about presenting dystopian stories during the pandemic’s peak, which caused a three-year gap between seasons five and six. For the upcoming season, Brooker has decided to include elements that he previously swore the show would never feature, according to Netflix.
“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.
“I was aware that I had written lots of episodes where someone goes ‘Oh, I was inside a computer the whole time!'” Brooker told 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.
In an interview with Radio Times in 2020, Brooker said: “At the moment, I don’t know what stomach there would be for stories about societies falling apart.”
Slated to premiere on June 15, the five-episode season of “Black Mirror” will showcase actors such as Salma Hayek Pinault, Michael Cera, and Zazie Beetz. The first episode, titled “Joan is Awful,” will be available on Netflix.
