‘Black Mirror’ creator calls AI experiment ‘sh–’
“It’s like something out of ‘Black Mirror,’ right?”
You may have said such a thing while reading about (or tinkering around with) AI tools like ChatGPT. If so, you weren’t the only one. “Black Mirror” series creator Charlie Booker clearly thought something similar, and in a new interview with the British film magazine Empire he confessed he was curious enough to see what would happen if he instructed the new technology to “generate a ‘Black Mirror’ episode.”
The results, he said, weren’t too impressive.
“t 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 synopsis 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.’”
Booker compared ChatGPT’s work to that of Mike Yarwood, a British impressionist and comic from the 1970s.
The experience wasn’t a total wash, however. Looking at ChatGPT’s output reminded him of what some of his harsher critics say, and inspired him to keep on his toes. “I was aware that I had written lots of episodes where someone goes ‘Oh, I was inside a computer the whole time!'” he said. “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. Just a sort of nice, cold glass of water in the face.”
The tech-heavy “Twilight Zone”-ish series, all of which is streamable on Netflix in the U.S., including the “interactive” special “Bandersnatch,” debuts its new season on June 15. The show has won eight Emmy Awards out of 14 nominations. The individual episodes “San Junipero” and “USS Calister,” as well as “Bandersnatch,” all won the Outstanding Television Movie prize.
The series debuted in 2011 on Britain’s Channel 4, then made its way to Netflix in 2016. The new batch of shows, five in total, features an impressive cast: Salma Hayek, Michael Cera, and Rob Delaney are in one episode, while Kate Mara, Aaron Paul, and Josh Hartnett are in another. What futuristic psychological hardships await them remain to be seen.
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