Charlie Brooker Tried To Get AI To Write An Episode Of Black Mirror – But It Was ‘Sh*t’

Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker said his attempt at using artificial intelligence to write an episode of the hit sci-fi series didn’t go so well. 

In a new interview with Empire Magazine, the Emmy-winning writer revealed that he tried to lean on ChatGPT to write an episode for the Netflix show but that the final product wound up going totally off the rails. 

“I’ve toyed around with ChatGPT a bit,” Brooker said. “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.”

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot tool that uses natural language processing to create human-like conversational dialogue. It also assists users with tasks like writing emails and essays. 

Brooker explained that all the chatbot basically did was sift through the show’s episode synopses and “sort of mush them together”, resulting in a whopping disappointment.

“Then if you dig a bit more deeply, you go, ‘Oh, there’s not actually any real original thought here,’” he added. 

Despite the AI flop, Brooker said the experience led him to have a major epiphany about his approach to the dystopian anthology series that often centers on themes of humanity’s connection with technology.

“I was aware that I had written lots of episodes where someone goes, ‘Oh, I was inside a computer the whole time!’” he quipped. “So I thought, ‘I’m just 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.”

Brooker added that playing around with AI was “just a sort of nice, cold glass of water in the face”.

Season 6 of “Black Mirror” hits Netflix on June 15.