'Black Mirror' writer Charlie Brooker used ChatGPT to pen an episode in Season 6, but AI chobot disappointed him

LONDON: Writer Charlie Brooker says he "toyed around" with an AI-enabled chatbot to write an episode for the sixth season of his popular dystopian series "Black Mirror", only to be disappointed later. After penning several episodes for the cult show, set in a high-tech near-future where humanity's greatest innovations and darkest instincts collide, Brooker said testing the theory in real life was like "a nice, cold glass of water in the face".

Brooker, creator and co-showrunner of "Black Mirror", said he tried out ChatGPT to find out if AI (artificial intelligence) technology could script a new episode.

"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 s***," the writer told the Empire magazine.



Brooker, 52, said all the program had done was "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'..." he added.

After being let down by technology, the Emmy winner said he realised it was time to try something new.

"I was aware that I had written lots of episodes where someone goes '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.' There's no point in having an anthology show if you can't break your own rules," he said.

"Black Mirror" season six features four more standalone episodes starring Aaron Paul, Annie Murphy, Salma Hayek Pinault, Ben Barnes, Michael Cera, Himesh Patel, and Zazie Beetz. It will start streaming on Netflix from June 15.