When we talk about the future of the world when it comes to technology and, specifically, the rise of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), you can’t help but think that we are perhaps living in a real episode of “Black Mirror.” And wouldn’t you know it? The creator of “Black Mirror” performed a bit of an experiment with A.I. when it came to crafting an episode of Season 6. Though, if his results are anything to judge by, we shouldn’t be overly worried, at this point.
Speaking to Empire, Charlie Brooker, the writer and creator of “Black Mirror,” talked about how he played around with A.I. when coming up with ideas for Season 6 of the anthology series. As you probably know, “Black Mirror” is a show that puts a mirror up to our society, extrapolating how modern technology could evolve into something completely sinister, or at least moderately freaky. So, it makes complete sense that he would do a meta-experiment by utilizing an A.I. tool like ChatGPT.
“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. 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.”
For those unaware, ChatGPT has been making headlines for the way it’s generative A.I. technology can comb through millions of bits of information (websites, books, news, etc…) and “write” responses in a humanistic way. So, when Brooker asks ChatGPT to write a “Black Mirror” episode, it’s doing exactly what he says—reading synopses of previous episodes, using research to come up with other topical ideas, and spewing them back in decent-enough English. It’s far from replicating creative human thought.
That said, if you wanted to postulate what could happen in the future, as these generative A.I. algorithms are further refined with more and more data, then we definitely could be looking at a world where technology could reasonably pass as human thought, but it’s still just mimicking creativity.
But hey, that would make for an interesting episode of “Black Mirror,” right? Season 6 debuts on Netflix on June 15.