Black Mirror Creator Says He Used ChatGPT To Write An Episode. It Was Terrible.

Charlie Brooker, the showrunner of “Black Mirror,” revealed in an interview that he used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to write an episode for the show’s sixth season but deemed the results “shit.” Gizmodo reports: “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,” the dystopian sci-fi auteur told Empire. “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 experiments with generating an episode of Black Mirror with AI might have been deemed a failure, Brooker told the outlet that it did point out some of his writing cliches. “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.”