“Black Mirror” creator Charlie Brooker revealed in June that he had been experimenting with having the artificial intelligence chatbot called ChatGPT write an episode of his popular anthology series. The end result was “shit,” he said at the time. During a recent panel discussion at the SXSW event at the International Convention Center in Sydney (via The Guardian), Brooker elaborated on the experiment.
“I said to ChatGPT, ‘Give me an outline for a Black Mirror story,’” Brooker said. “In the first few sentences you feel a cold rush of fear, like animal terror… like I’m being fucking replaced. I won’t even see what it does. I’m going to jump out the damn window.
The more ChatGPT wrote the episode, the more Brooker’s fear of being replaced lessened. Without the messiness of being human, ChatGPT could never be as successful as a real screenwriter, Brooker said.
“As it goes on, you think, ‘Oh, this is boring.’ I was scared a second ago, now I’m bored because this is so absurd,” he said. “It’s just an imitation of something. It sucked up every description of every Black Mirror episode, probably from Wikipedia and other things people have written, and it’s kind of vomiting on me. It pretends to be something it is not capable of.”
Brooker also addressed some fan backlash against Black Mirror, which aired two seasons and a Christmas special on Channel 4 before moving to Netflix for four more seasons.
“One of the criticisms we sometimes get is: ‘I prefer the show when it was British and everyone in it was miserable and everything smelled a bit like shit and all the stories were terrible,’” Brooker said. “And then it went to Netflix and suddenly everything is sunny and happy and everyone has wonderful teeth and it’s full of Hollywood stars and it lost that appeal.”
Brooker said he understood those complaints, but said the show’s changing tone was never a mandate from Netflix, but rather reflected his own interests.
“Probably the happiest [episode] “I ever wrote ‘San Junipero,’ and I just wrote it on my own,” he said. “I was aware that we’re going to a global platform now, so we need to make these stories a little more international. And I wanted to add some variety to not just do dark-a-thons.”
“Black Mirror” is available to stream on Netflix.
Source : variety.com