Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker gets brutally honest about his experience when he created a ChatGPT-generated script of a hypothetical episode. Brooker’s sci-fi dystopia anthology series started on British network Channel 4 in 2011 before finding a new home on Netflix in 2016. Black Mirror has explored the bleak potential that advancing technology could bring, from advances in virtual reality to the dangers of social media and reality television fame.
With Black Mirror season 6 releasing on June 16, Brooker opened up to Empire about his experiments with currently topical technology out of curiosity. While Brooker stated that the software ChatGPT generated a story that may, at first glance, seem workable, further inspection left him unimpressed as he noticed that the software had scraped his and others’ prior work into a synopsis. ChatGPT’s outline highlighted some of the series’ repetitive tropes to Brooker, pushing him to be more experimental in writing future episodes of the series. Check out what he said below:
“I’ve toyed around with ChatGPT a bit. 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.
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.”
How ChatGPT Is At The Centre Of Discussions About The Future Of Hollywood
While Brooker and Black Mirror are no strangers to tackling contemporary stories around advancing technology’s dark potential, generative AI software, including ChatGPT, is at the forefront of discussions about the future of many creative industries today. While individuals online have experimented with AI-generated voices and scripts, many writers, artists, and actors have voiced their discomfort at how the software operates by scraping data from their works without permission and could be used by companies to put many creatives out of work and prevent new voices from making an impact. Furthermore, the topic became a talking point that could shape the future of many industries.
Most notably, the use of generative AI scripts is one of the subjects that is a pressing matter for the Writer’s Guild of America 2023 strike action. Alongside fairer pay and job security assurances that reflect the current state of film and television, the WGA also proposed regulations and restrictions be put in place for the use of generative writing software like ChatGPT in the writing process, a demand that networks and studios refused to discuss. With the strike set to continue into the foreseeable future, the Black Mirror creator’s comments come at a pivotal time for those wary of how the software could impact their livelihoods.
Black Mirror has been praised for its commentaries on rising trends and technologies throughout the 2010s. The acclaimed creator’s points about ChatGPT reflect many fears and talking points that artists and writers have cited, raising more awareness for the discussions surrounding its potential. However, the experience highlighting the series’ recurring aspects raises curiosities about how the writer has shaken up future Black Mirror stories to fascinate and terrify in new ways.
Source: Empire
This story originally appeared on Screenrant
