The creator of the dark and addictive sci-fi series Black Mirror saw fit to ask ChatGPT to create an episode for Season 6 only to find out that the chatbot “is crap”.
Charlie Brooker, 52, said he typed in “generate an episode of Black Mirror” and received a story that “kinda mixed” all the others together.
The first thing Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker did, when everyone first tried ChatGPT, was type in “generate a 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 written most episodes of the haunting Twilight Zone-esque series since its 2011 debut season on Channel 4 in the UK – said his contact with an AI-generated lookalike of his own show taught him to be less robotic himself.
The Black Mirror creator’s experience with ChatGPT encouraged him to make bolder creative choices with future seasons of the dystopian anthology series. An upcoming episode “Beyond The Sea,” starring Josh Hartnett (above) is set in an alternate 1969
ChatGPT first launched in November, sparking excitement and alarm over its ability to generate compelling human-like essays, poems, form letters, and conversational responses to almost any question.
“I knew I had written a lot of episodes where someone was like, ‘Oh, I was in a computer all the time! “said Brooker. Empire Review during an exclusive teaser of the new season, which lands on Netflix this month.
“So I thought, ‘I’m just going to give an idea of what I think an episode of Black Mirror is,'” he admitted.
“There’s no point having an anthology show if you can’t break your own rules.”
Brooker compared reading ChatGPT’s version of his series to a parody impersonation of 1970s British comedian Mike Yarwood (“there’s a topical reference,” Brooker joked.)
“Just kind of a good glass of cold water in the face,” he said.
An upcoming episode of the show, “Beyond The Sea” with Breaking Bad’s Kate Mara, Josh Hartnett and Aaron Paul, seems characteristic of Brooker’s penchant for creative risk-taking and bold new directions for the show.
The episode, exclusive stills of which have been shared with Empire, is set in an alternate version of 1969 where its protagonists have been placed on an impossible mission.
At the end of the episode, Brooker said that viewers will have experienced a “sort of dystopian past, present, and future”.
Charlie Brooker, 52, said he typed in “generate a Black Mirror episode” and received a story that “kinda mixed” all the others together.
The new season of Black Mirror is coming to Netflix in June. Brooker told Empire he wanted to do new things with the show, saying the point of an anthology show was to “break your own rules.” Above, Anjana Vasan stars in a new episode, ‘DEMON 79’, set in the north of England in 1979
Brooker says the period settings for these new episodes will inform “how the characters think and behave,” including Aaron Paul’s character (above) in “Beyond the Sea” in June.
“I first had the idea for the plot, then at some point I thought [sarcastically], ‘What if I put this in the late 60s? That would be, like, disruptive and cool!”
The writer, whose work included satire and horror before creating Black Mirror, said the idea of an alternate period piece matured to tell a romance story pinned in a dark and critical way to attitudes of that era. Mid-Century Apollo.
“When you’ve just written it, you realize, ‘Oh wait, if this is another era and everyone is from that era, that actually informs how the characters think and behave. “
“I don’t think there was a deliberate rejection of nostalgia,” Brooker said, “as long as it was just a fun thing to do.”
Black Mirror season 6 is set 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 wondering what’s real and what’s not from the start, with Netflix playing a central role – and providing a meta twist – in the opening episode Joan Is Awful.
The dystopian show has captured the world’s attention for over a decade now, with its twisted take on the future of technology.
And in April, fans went wild after Black Mirror made a surprise comeback on Twitter, after four years of total silence, with the tweet: ‘What did we miss?’
