Black Mirror creator had AI write an episode, and it was garbage

The rise of AI language generators like ChatGPT is causing unrest in creative industries; the striking writers in Hollywood want restrictions placed on it, and it’s causing issues in the world of publishing. Huge companies are eager to use AI to increase their profits, while creative workers fear how it could take their jobs and infringe on their rights. It all sounds like something out of Black Mirror, the Twilight Zone-esque sci-fi show created by Charlie Brooker.

But as impressive as the language generating abilities of ChatGPT can be, by its very nature, it’s not a tool that can really create new and original ideas. Brooker himself recently toyed with that idea when he asked it to write an episode of Black Mirror just for kicks. The results were…not great.

Charlie Booker had ChatGPT write an episode of Black Mirror, and he was not impressed

“I’ve toyed around with ChatGPT a bit,” Brooker told Empire. “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. 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.’ It’s [1970s impressionist] Mike Yarwood — there’s a topical reference.”

Brooker’s sentiments are something that have been expressed time and again. Calling ChatGPT “AI” as in, “artificial intelligence” is almost somewhat of a misnomer; it really just pulls a bunch of information from elsewhere on the internet and paraphrases it. It cannot create anything that’s actually new. That said, this experiment did contribute to Brooker’s process for Black Mirror season 6 in an unexpected way: he did the opposite of what the text generator thought a Black Mirror episode should be.

“I was aware that I had written lots of episodes where someone goes, ‘Oh, I was inside a computer the whole time!’ 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.”

A good example of this is the upcoming episode “Beyond the Sea,” which stars Aaron Paul, Kate Mara and Josh Hartnett. This one is a period piece set in 1969, and it proved particularly challenging for Brooker and his team.

"I had the plot idea first and then, at one point, I thought [adopts the voice of a TV-making moron], “What if I set this in the late ’60s? That’d be, like, disruptive and cool! And then when you actually come to write it, you realise, ‘Oh, hang on, if this is a different time and everyone in it is from that time, that actually informs how the characters are thinking and behaving.’ But I don’t think there was a deliberate rejection of nostalgia, so much as it was just a fun thing to do."

All five episodes of Black Mirror season 6 drops on Netflix on June 15.

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