ChatGPT ‘is sh**’: Black Mirror creator asked AI chatbot to write an episode of his Netflix hit – only to be given ‘mush’ synopses of past shows
- Black Mirror creator attempted to use ChatGPT to write an episode for Season 6
- The creator said there was not thought behind the AI-powered script
- READ MORE: Black Mirror is back! Show returns with 5 mind-bending episodes
The creator of the darkly addictive sci-fi series Black Mirror saw it fitting to ask ChatGPT to conjure up an episode for Season 6 only to find the chatbot ‘is sh***.’
Charlie Brooker, 52, said he typed in ‘generate Black Mirror episode’ and received a story ‘that sorta mushed’ all the other ones together.
The first thing Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker did, when everyone was trying ChatGPT for the first time, was to type in ‘generate Black Mirror episode.’
Speaking to Empire, Brooker found there was no real thought behind the AI-generated script, only that it read ‘plausibly.’
Brooker — who has been writing most episodes of the haunting, Twilight Zone-esque series since its first 2011 season on UK’s Channel 4 — said that his brush with an AI-generated doppelgänger of his own show did teach him to be less robotic himself.
The Black Mirror creator’s experience with ChatGPT has encouraged him to make bolder creative choices with future seasons of the dystopian anthology series. One upcoming episode ‘Beyond The Sea,’ starring Josh Hartnett (above) takes place in an alternate 1969
ChatGPT was first unleashed in November, sparking excitement and alarm at its ability to generate convincingly human-like essays, poems, form letters and conversational answers to almost any question.
‘I was aware that I had written lots of episodes where someone goes ‘Oh, I was inside a computer the whole time!” Brooker told Empire Magazine during an exclusive tease of the new season, which lands on Netflix this month.
‘So I thought, ‘I’m just going to chuck out any sense of what I think a Black Mirror episode is,” he admitted.
‘There’s no point in having an anthology show if you can’t break your own rules.’
Brooker likened reading ChatGPT’s version of his series to being the subject of a parody impersonation from 1970s British comedian Mike Yarwood (‘there’s a topical reference,’ Brooker joked.)
‘Just a sort of nice, cold glass of water in the face,’ he said.
One upcoming episode of the series, ‘Beyond The Sea’ starring Kate Mara, Josh Hartnett and Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul, sounds characteristic of Brooker’s penchant for creative risk-taking and bold new directions for the show.
The episode, exclusive stills of which were shared with Empire, takes place in an alternate version of 1969 where its protagonists have been set on an impossible mission.
By the episode’s end, Brooker said viewers will have experienced a ‘sort of dystopian past, present and future.’
Charlie Brooker, 52, said he typed in ‘generate Black Mirror episode’ and received a story ‘that sorta mushed’ all the other ones together
Black Mirror’s new season comes to Netflix this June. Brooker told Empire that he wants to do new things with the series, saying the point of an anthology show is to ‘break your own rules.’ Above Anjana Vasan stars in a new episode, ‘DEMON 79’ set in Northern England in 1979
Brooker says the period settings for these new episodes will inform ‘how the characters are thinking and behaving,’ including Aaron Paul’s character (above) in ‘Beyond the Sea’ this June
‘I had the plot idea first and then, at one point, I thought [sarcastically], ‘What if I set this in the late ’60s? That’d be, like, disruptive and cool!”
The writer, whose work included satire and horror before creating Black Mirror, said that the alternative period piece idea matured into telling a novel story pinned in a dark and critical way to the attitudes of that mid-century Apollo era.
‘When you actually come to write it, you realize, ‘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.”
‘I don’t think there was a deliberate rejection of nostalgia,’ Brooker said, ‘so much as it was just a fun thing to do.’
Black Mirror Season 6 is due to hit Netflix on June 15, with an all-star cast led by Salma Hayek, Michael Cera and Rory Culkin – among other well-known celebrities.
Fans will be left questioning what is real and what isn’t from the very start, with Netflix playing a pivotal role – and providing a meta twist – in opening episode Joan Is Awful.
The dystopian show has captured the world’s attention for more than a decade now, with its twisted take on the future of technology.
And in April fans went wild after Black Mirror made a surprise return to Twitter, after four years of total silence, with the tweet: ‘What have we missed?’
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