Season 6 of black-mirror is coming to Netflix soon, and Charlie Brooker, its creator, shared that he asked ChatGPT to write the script for an episode. He was not retained.
black-mirror has got into the habit of making us anxious and questioning our use of new technologies. After having imagined nanorobots, neural implants and even an artificial intelligence that is gradually taking the place of a singer, it seemed only natural that the creators of the series should take an interest in ChatGPT. And that’s exactly what they did.
In an interview with the American magazine Empire on June 6, Charlie Brooker, the creator of the series, explained that he had tried the chatbot developed by OpenAI. Naturally, ” the first thing i did was ask it to generate an episode of black mirror “, he said.
“There’s nothing really original about it”
In the interview, Charlie Brooker says that the result was not really up to his expectations. ChatGPT “ came up with something that, at first glance, held up “. However, ” on closer inspection, it was crap. All he did was take all of the Black Mirror episode synopses, and he kind of combined them all together. When you dig a little bit you’re like ‘Oh, there’s nothing really original about it’ “, he says.
But the experience was not for all that useless. The creator indicates that it allowed him to realize some of his writing faults. ” I know I’ve written a lot of episodes where people are like, ‘Oh, I was on a computer the whole time. So, I thought I would think differently about what makes an episode of Black Mirror. There’s no point in making an anthology series if you can’t break your own rules. “.
Unfortunately, no more is known about the content of the episode written by ChatGPT. Was he talking about himself, artificial intelligence, or space exploration? We will certainly have to wait for another Charlie Brooker interview to find out.
It is in any case hardly surprising that to see that the teams of black-mirror interested in artificial intelligence. Since the first season, the series has been dissecting new technologies, but above all, showing us that the excesses come from humans themselves. At the moment, AI is a ready-made subject: ChatGPT is constantly in the headlines, and even industry leaders are asking for a framework for these tools so that they do not represent risks for humanity.
It would be legitimate to be disappointed that Charlie Brooker did not go to the end of the story: the approach could have delivered a real dystopian mise en abyme, revealing only at the end that the episode came from an AI , and showing, perhaps, the faults of such writing.
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