Netflix’s critically acclaimed series Black Mirror may have had some help from artificial intelligence in soon-to-air season six. Creator of Black Mirror and Emmy Award winning writer Charlie Brooker (Fifteen Million Merits, Death to 2020) confessed to seeing if AI could write a full episode of the series.

During the writing of season six of the anthology series, The Hollywood Reporter stated that Brooker ended up playing around with well-known artificial intelligence software, ChatGPT. This is a big topic of conversation currently due to the Writer’s Guild of America’s ongoing strike. 

When Brooker tried to have AI write an entire episode, it didn’t pan out how he thought it would. “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.” This further proves that artificial intelligence cannot replicate human creativity. After further review of what AI wrote for the episode, Brooker stated that “all it’s done is look up the synopses of Black Mirror episodes, and sort of mush them together.”

Black Mirror is not a simple show to replicate; it’s a complex anthology episodic series, meaning that there’s a new storyline, and in Black Mirror’s case, a new reality, in each episode that shows the disturbing and immoral effects of technology on the human race. 

While Brooker noted that “there’s not actually any real original thought” in terms of artificial intelligence and that “there’s no point in having an anthology show if you can’t break your own rules,” he also admitted that there was a plus to using AI. 

Brooker admitted that artificial intelligence helped him get a good start on the layout and writing of Black Mirror season six. 

Look out for the newest season addition of Netflix’s Black Mirror set to come out in full on June 15th.