ChatGPT Was Tasked With Writing An Episode For Black Mirror & Failed Tremendously

The human mind behind "Black Mirror," a mind-bending TV show known for its unexpected plot twists, asked ChatGPT to write an episode for the hit series and likened the results to "sh*t." Talking to Empire about his experience, "Black Mirror" creator Charlie Brooker revealed that he asked the AI chatbot to generate episode ideas for the acclaimed series and came out underwhelmed.

"All it's done is look up all the synopses of 'Black Mirror' episodes and sort of mush them together," Brooker said. The results are not surprising. Ever since ChatGPT popped up on the internet and AI evangelists started to hawk its seemingly limitless potential, creative folks have complained about how the AI chatbot has a habit of regurgitating the same ideas over and over again.

By their nature, AI chatbots like ChatGPT are tasked with presenting a summarized version of what they find online and source from their training data using natural language. Brooker's experience with ChatGPT falls in line with SlashGear's interview with a filmmaker, who remarked that ChatGPT can't be trusted with generating new ideas for creative projects and that it has some diversity and bias issues to overcome, as well.

While the "Black Mirror" creator couldn't get OpenAI's chatbot to generate a cool episode idea, he landed at a contrarian positive from the experience. Since ChatGPT was essentially giving episode ideas that looked like a potpourri of existing "Black Mirror" tropes, Brooker realized those were the plot points he should avoid to maintain the originality that his TV show is known for.

Unlike Brooker, who has an industry reputation to maintain, there are folks who have successfully put the AI to the test. One example is an actual film created by extensively using ChatGPT. Aaron Kemmer — whose company made the first 3D printer that works in zero gravity after collaborating with NASA — detailed on Twitter how his team used ChatGPT to generate hundreds of film ideas, write a script, plan each shot, decide on costumes, and finish the entire film in just seven days.

The whole endeavor itself sounds like a dystopian "Black Mirror" plot, where human effort has been entirely ditched in favor of machine output, even when it comes to something as creatively demanding as a film. At the same time, there's ample resentment and backlash from the community of writers, designers, and other folks employed by the industry who are protesting against the use of generative AI tools to replace them, even though those AI programs have been trained on their own human work.