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Jun 29, 2023

Black Mirror Creator Charlie Brooker Tried ChatGPT to Write an Episode

"If you dig a bit more deeply you go, 'Oh, there’s not actually any real

"If you dig a bit more deeply you go, 'Oh, there's not actually any real original thought here,'" the Emmy winner said of the AI-generated script

Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker didn't have much luck during his first foray road-testing artificial intelligence.

In a move that could be a storyline from the tech-driven anthology series, Brooker recently enlisted the controversial AI program ChatGPT to write an episode of his show. Like many of the Netflix series’ episodes, his experiment did not have a happy ending.

"I’ve toyed around with ChatGPT a bit," Brooker, 52, told Empire. "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 s---."

The five-time Emmy-winning writer said he thinks the end result is unsatisfactory because all the chatbot did was find episode synopses 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,’" he explained.

Emma McIntyre/Getty

Brooker's encounter with ChatGPT did have a silver lining, though — in a Black Mirror-esque twist, the AI chatbot taught him what not to do in future episodes.

It turns out, the AI-generated script made him realize just how many episodes of the series have included a character realizing, "Oh, I was inside a computer the whole time!"

"So I thought, 'I’m just going to chuck out any sense of what I think a Black Mirror episode is,’" he said. "There's no point in having an anthology show if you can't break your own rules."

He added that the AI experience was "just a sort of nice, cold glass of water in the face."

After a four-year hiatus, Black Mirror returns to Netflix this summer.

The cast of the show's sixth season includes Aaron Paul, Annie Murphy, Ben Barnes, Himesh Patel, Josh Hartnett, Kate Mara, Michael Cera, Rory Culkin, Salma Hayek Pinault and Zazie Beetz.

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Black Mirror season 6 will be available to stream June 15 on Netflix.