‘Black Mirror’ Creator Got ChatGPT To Write An Episode But It Didn’t Go Well

After a four-year hiatus, Netflix’s famed dystopian series Black Mirror will be returning, and amid the artificial intelligence boom, too.

So it comes as almost no surprise that AI, a subject frequently explored in the anthology show, had played a tiny part in the making of season six. What’s more astonishing is that its contribution was scrapped almost immediately. In an interview with Empire magazine, creator Charlie Brooker admitted to dabbling with ChatGPT to potentially generate an episode.

Brooker had entered the phrase “generate Black Mirror episode” into the chatbot, prompting it to compose a whole plot inspired by his sci-fi series.

At first, he thought the results “[read] plausibly,” but when he delved deeper, he discovered that the text was “s**t.”

The Black Mirror maker said the AI didn’t write a solid script because it essentially took existing episode synopses and “sort of [mushed] them together.” There was no original thought from the machine, he added.

There were some meaningful takeaways from this experience, nonetheless. In its lack of creativity, ChatGPT actually revealed what Brooker should steer clear from in future plots. 

Its “mushing” of storylines made Brooker realize that too many episodes have involved a character getting an epiphany that they’d been inside a computer the whole time.

That got Brooker thinking that he should throw out his current perception of what a Black Mirror story entails. After all, there’s “no point in having an anthology show if you can’t break your own rules,” he noted.

[via PEOPLE and Empire, cover photo 276343647 © Rokas Tenys | Dreamstime.com]