Even though generative artificial intelligence is already taking people’s jobs, the creator of the dystopian sci-fi horror series Black Mirror isn’t so worried about his own. Probably because every time a new technology threatens to rip the fabric of society apart, the next season of Black Mirror writes itself—but not using ChatGPT. It’s not “messy” enough.
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Speaking at SXSW Sydney, Brooker said he’s tried to see if ChatGPT could come up with a horror scenario as good or better than a PS5 that plays you. Thankfully, artificial intelligence doesn’t have the life experience to fully grasp irony.
“I said to ChatGPT, ‘Go give me an outline for a Black Mirror story,’” Brooker said (via The Guardian). “As it’s coming through in the first couple of sentences, you feel a cold spike of fear, like animal terror, like I’m being fucking replaced. I’m not even gonna see what it does. I’m gonna jump out the fucking window.”
But Brooker wasn’t experiencing his own Black Mirror moment, where a computer designed to help humanity ends up destroying it. Instead, he discovered that AI isn’t that good at creative tasks. “As it carries on, you go, ‘Oh, this is boring. I was frightened a second ago; now I’m bored because this is so derivative.’”
As we all know by now, AI is not much more than a plagiarism machine that takes the wealth of the internet’s creativity and spits it out in a different order. It’s a word predictor that generates boring junk and occasionally nightmarish images of the Grimace with too many teeth eating a Fry Guy. Brooker gets it: “It’s just emulating something. It’s Hoovered up every description of every Black Mirror episode, presumably from Wikipedia and other things that people have written, and it’s just sort of vomiting that back at me. It’s pretending to be something it isn’t capable of being.”
Brooker “can’t quite see it replacing messy people,” and messy people create good art. However, messy people and [shudder] artists are what tech-chasing CEOs and private investors are trying to squeeze out. And despite Brooker’s fears of AI limitation, the company that produces his show is investing heavily in the technology. Over the summer, as the writers’ strike raged and the SAG strike began, Netflix listed a job for an AI Product manager with a six-figure income. Sure, AI is dull and derivative now, but maybe Brooker should consider that it might get better sooner rather than later. He could probably write an episode on the subject: “The AI smart fridge that took over the world” sounds like a good Black Mirror.