Writers for television can rest easy knowing that their jobs are safe from artificial intelligence, at least for now. According to Charlie Brooker, showrunner for the massively popular Netflix series Black Mirror, AI cannot be relied upon to write a TV episode.
In a recent interview with Empire, Brooker revealed that he gave the popular large language model chatbot a simple prompt to “generate [a] Black Mirror episode.” But what it gave him was something that looked good on the surface, but once you dug a little deeper it was, as Brooker put it, “shit.”
“If you dig a bit more deeply you go, ‘Oh, there’s not actually any real original thought here,’” he said. It did have one benefit though, and that was giving Brooker some good constructive criticism of his work. “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.’”
