[Below are some presence-related parts of a Wired interview with Charlie Brooker, the creator and writer of Black Mirror, the “darkly funny, scarily prescient, and hugely popular Netflix anthology series.” For more of his recent comments as the sixth season of the series launches, see interviews in Dazed, Esquire and Empire. –Matthew]
[Image: Credit: Michael Wharley/Netflix]
Black Mirror’s Charlie Brooker Wants to Break the Content Machine
After years of exploring society’s dark absurdities, the sixth season of Netflix’s wildly popular sci-fi show looks at its own reflection.
By Amit Katwala
June 14, 2023
[snip]
WIRED: It’s been four years since the last season of Black Mirror. What’s it been like writing a dystopian sci-fi show against an increasingly dystopian backdrop?
Charlie Brooker: I started writing the season during the pandemic, and I think when I started writing it—apart from Zoom, which suddenly everyone was using—it felt a bit like things had plateaued, but obviously the world was going through a tough old dystopian time of it.
[snip]
You’re a renowned worrier—are you worried about the existential threat of artificial intelligence?
I mean, yes, in as much as I’m worried about everything else.
But are there AI-specific things on your mind?
I’m annoyed: I wanted to do an episode about an AI standup comedian and I didn’t quite get the story this time and now I sort of feel, “Ah, does that look a bit reactive now rather than pre-emptive?” There’s been stories that we’ve been doing about AI for a long time, I think the first one was probably “Be Right Back,” with Domhnall Gleeson and Hayley Atwell, and he dies and she uses a sort of AI ChatGPT for grieving people to talk to him. In a way that sums it up for me, because he becomes a sort of bland emulation, something that isn’t actually as messy and surprising and strange and crap as the original him. It becomes this weird, watered-down echo.
You recently told Empire you had ChatGPT write a Black Mirror episode and it was “shit.”
The worry at the moment is that executives will use it to generate a list of crap ideas that have been mulched together from actual humans’ unpaid ideas: hoovered up off the internet and then mushed together into a mash. Great, I own this IP, now I’ll hire in human writers cheaply to actually make this serviceable, because ChatGPT cannot do that at the moment. That’s certainly a valid concern.
Yes.
When it comes to the illustration stuff, I’m in two minds, because you can see it’s capable of pumping out imagery that’s really startling. It can emulate the style of existing human beings, and it can synthesize and blend it all together. If I was an illustrator I’d be extremely worried about commissions drying up.
What about its impact beyond creative industries?
What if it goes all Skynet and decides to wipe us out? I remember reading an article that said that will happen in an afternoon, if it’s gonna happen. We’ll wake up one morning and stretch and yawn, and by the time the sun goes down we’ll be sharing the planet with an intelligence that’s 50 billion times as intelligent as us, and then all bets are off as to what it could do. We can’t possibly predict it.
But maybe if these things are built in our own image they’ll just be crippled with anxiety and self-loathing?
That would make them more interesting. But the problem is they’re sort of not. I’ve seen stories about robots that suddenly develop human emotions, and I’ve always avoided that in Black Mirror because I find them hard to relate to.
Maybe I’m a robot, or maybe I’ve got too many emotions, I don’t know. But I always found it not that interesting as a storyline—maybe because I’m selfish and I think, “I don’t care about the fucking robot.” And “Be Right Back” was written as an anti-“robot develops emotion” story. The AI shows up, but it can’t ever quite get there. And it’s not really thinking; it’s not really feeling.
Society’s worries tend to shift over time: AI, climate change, and the threat of nuclear war, which comes up in one of the new episodes. Black Mirror has always been pretty good at predicting what the next thing we should worry about should be. What are you worried about now that we’ll be worrying about in 10 years’ time?
Short term, the thing that worries me is disinformation, misinformation: the unfunny end of that image of the Pope in a puffer jacket that went viral a few weeks ago and turned out to have been generated by an AI. You can obviously see what happens when stuff like that is weaponized, and that’s going to be coming very soon. That’s terrifying, because some of the gatekeepers don’t seem to give a shit or are actively encouraging that.
So that frightens me—what people do when they’re afraid and misinformed. This is depressing isn’t it? That is probably going to be our biggest challenge over the next 10 years. And then beyond that, all the rest of it: climate, nukes, you name it. Keep it light!
But a lot of things you’ve written into Black Mirror have happened—and a lot of things that do happen feel like they could or should have happened in the show. Even something like the Apple Vision Pro is such a dystopian device in many ways.
It’s weird, it’s really weird. One of my instincts when I saw that was like, “Oh my God, that’s so Black Mirror.” We haven’t got anything quite like that in this season—but then that’s because we did it! We did it all years ago. But a lot of the time what I was doing was looking at things and extrapolating, so it’s not that surprising in many ways.
But they’re warnings, right? You make these shows as a warning about not making the thing, and then they go ahead and make the thing.
I don’t know if it’s necessarily about not making the thing. Usually there’s a weak and flawed human in the story to fuck things up rather than it being the technology specifically. We did “Metalhead,” which was about robot AI dogs going around killing people—fair enough, that’s the technology. But in the “Entire History of You,” the memory playback episode, it’s this jealous and insecure husband who fucks up his own life. It’s not generally the fault of the technology within the stories.
I am generally pro-technology. Probably we’re going to have to rely on it if we’re going to survive, so I wouldn’t say they’re necessarily warnings, so much as worries, if you know what I mean. They’re maybe worst-case scenarios. I read a thing—maybe I read it in WIRED—about technology companies having “red teams” who sit around thinking, “How could someone misuse this? We’ve just invented the Apple AirTag, what if somebody stalks somebody with it?” That is often what I’m doing.
Invariably, they’ll just decide to release it anyway!
That’s the thing I find scary. Well OK, disrupt away, and just unleash the hounds and … “Oh shit, oh dear, we’ve killed everyone.”