Black Mirror creator says ChatGPT episode was “sh*t”

❘ Published: 2023-06-06T16:19:11

Netflix

Black Mirror’s creator tried to use ChatGPT to create an episode of the meta show, but it didn’t end well.

If you’re unfamiliar with Netflix‘s smash hit show, Black Mirror, here’s a quick rundown: the story follows loosely connected episodes that deal with real world subjects such as racism, death, mental illness, etc, but twists them in new and incredibly meta ways.

There’s been a huge gap between Season 5 and Season 6 of the show as the last episode aired in 2019. The reason why the show had such a long hiatus was due to the fact that the creators found the global shutdown was scary enough to deal with without their input.

Thankfully, fans will be getting a new season later this month, but some have wondered if the team who has talked about the benefits and downfall of advanced technology used any AI programs to write this script and now Black Mirror’s creator has spoken up about the matter.

Black mirror creator said ChatGPT can’t write a good episode

It’s no secret that Black Mirror has had an uneasy relationship with technology. Between people being punished for their poor social rankings to the ability to transfer consciousness against one’s will, the Netflix drama has shown its audience the dark underbelly of what happens when you rely too much on technology.

However, that hasn’t stopped people in the real world from making significant advancements when it comes to technology, especially AI. One of the most popular AI-fuelled software at the moment is ChatGPT, a natural language processing tool that allows you to have human-like conversations and much more with the chatbot.

Since ChatGPT can be used to mimic human speech, Black Mirror fans wondered if it would be used to help write some episodes of the upcoming season, but the show’s creator, Charlie Brooker, shut down any notions of that due to the tool’s writing being absolutely terrible.

In an interview with Empire, Brooker shared his experience with the tool stating, “I’ve toyed around with ChatGPT a bit. 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. Because 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.”

While his experience with ChatGPT was disappointing, it turned out to be a bit of a self-serving prophecy as, just like in Black Mirror, the problem wasn’t the tool itself, but how it was being used by the humans that made it.

Brooker explained that he knew he had written a lot of episodes of Black Mirror when he read the ChatGPT script that ended with “Oh, I was inside a computer the whole time!” He went on to say that, from that experience, he was going to “going to chuck out any sense of what I think a Black Mirror episode is. 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.”

Black Mirror Season 6 premieres in June 15, 2023 on Netflix. In the meantime, you can check out our other Netflix hubs below: