Black Mirror creator attempted to utilize AI to write an episode for season 6

It seems like the perfect idea — a popular Netflix anthology horror sci-fi about the dark ramifications of having technology that is omnipresent actually being written by an artificially intelligent algorithm. As AI becomes more and more prevalent, there’s a current debate and a great fear about artists and writers being overtaken by the ever-advancing technology. This is especially a topic at the forefront of the current situation surrounding the WGA strike. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the creator of Black Mirror decided to plunge head-first into the method and tried to use AI to write an episode for the upcoming season 6.

Charlie Brooker recently gave an interview with Empire magazine where he admitted that he dabbled in using ChatGPT, the chatbot developed by OpenAI. Brooker would explain, “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. 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.”

AI is a technology that could have a serious impact on the future of entertainment along with deepfakes, and it can only get more advanced. Brooker admits that while dipping his toe in the method, he did take away useful lessons to help him with writing season 6, even if he did find the generated results utterly ridiculous. The way that the algorithm combined past Black Mirror episodes, he found that there were ideas he unintentionally repeated throughout the series. Brooker says, “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.’”

Having this new revelation, Brooker started thinking, “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.” And with that, the sci-fi writer noted that he “stretched the parameters” of what to expect in a Black Mirror episode for the upcoming season.

Black Mirror season 6 will be available to stream on Netflix on June 15.