Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker isn’t afraid of “boring” AI

Thanks to free tools like ChatGPT, the rise of artificial intelligence (or simply AI) has been rapid this year. No, it’s not reached Skynet or Black Mirror levels, but it is causing fears among creatives. A big reason for the writers and actors strikes in Hollywood was to place guardrails on the use of AI in the industry.

With all that said, for every benefit of artificial intelligence, there are numerous glaring drawbacks. But don’t just take it from me; Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker recently took aim at AI for being both “boring” and “derivative.”

To test the current capabilities of artificial intelligence, Brooker asked ChatGPT to write him an episode of Black Mirror. What it initially spat out had him questioning his career.

“I said to ChatGPT, ‘Go give me an outline for a Black Mirror story,’” Brooker said at SXSW Sydney. “As it’s coming through in the first couple of sentences, you feel a cold spike of fear, like animal terror, like I’m being fucking replaced. I’m not even gonna see what it does. I’m gonna jump out the fucking window.”

However, as the story dragged out, Brooker realized that it was a regurgitated mess, lacking the nuance of an original story. “As it carries on, you go, ‘Oh, this is boring. I was frightened a second ago; now I’m bored because this is so derivative,’” he explained.

Black Mirror creator thinks generative AI is “pretending to be something it isn’t capable of being”

While it might seem like magic, what ChatGPT really does is gather information about the subject from everywhere across the internet, mashes it all together in a way that sounds cohesive, and feeds it back to you. Needless to say, Brooker was not impressed:

"It’s just emulating something. It’s Hoovered up every description of every Black Mirror episode, presumably from Wikipedia and other things that people have written, and it’s just sort of vomiting that back at me. It’s pretending to be something it isn’t capable of being."

Thanks to his work on Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker is a man who has imagined every possible dystopian sci-fi scenario, and he knows all too well about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Clearly, AI in its current form isn’t anything to worry about. He concludes that it doesn’t have the complexity of the human mind to write something “messy” enough.

We’re safe, folks. For now, at least…

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels