The times being what they are, you can’t go a full day without hearing about ChatGPT or some other AI innovation that’s taking over the tech world. Depending on who you listen to, this is either proving to be a premature salvation for mankind or the black horseman of the apocalypse that neo-luddites have been warning us about for years. But for Black Mirror showrunner Charlie Brooker, this surrealist phenomenon is neither an ominous herald of the end-times nor a revolutionary next step in technology, but a tool to be used for what it is, and a rather incompetent one, at that.
You’d think that AI like ChatGPT and the unnerving way with which they replicate human interaction should be the bread and butter of a narrative like Black Mirror. After all, this is a series that has always tried to make people afraid of a dystopian future society, where such luxuries as privacy or human integrity are no longer in vogue. So, why wouldn’t at least one of its episodes deal with something like ChatGPT?
Brooker understands that sentiment to some degree. He even tried to get the recently popularized AI to write a Black Mirror episode. But it seems that the all-knowing algorithm failed to come up with anything original.
“I’ve toyed around with ChatGPT a bit,” Brooker told Empire in a recent interview. “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 sh*t. 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.”
That’s certainly bad news for all those people who thought AI was going to replace screenwriters in the near future. That doesn’t mean ChatGPT has no utility. As Brooker explained it, this back-and-forth between the general-purpose language model helped him realize a flaw in his own work.
“I was aware that I had written lots of episodes where someone goes ‘Oh, I was inside a computer the whole time!'” He says, laughing. “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.”
Does that mean the upcoming season 6 won’t feature one of those classic Black Mirror twists where the character realizes that all of their ordeals took place inside a simulation of a simulation of a simulation? Given how weary everyone has grown of such tired tropes, that’d be a much-welcome development, and ironically enough, we’d owe it all to ChatGPT.