Black Mirror: How AI Influenced The Creator's New Direction For Season 6

Artificial intelligence influenced the new season of the dystopian drama "Black Mirror," but not in the way you might think.

Speaking to Empire Magazine ahead of the sixth season's premiere on Netflix, "Black Mirror" creator and showrunner Charlie Brooker revealed that, just for fun, he tried playing with ChatGPT to see what would happen while he was writing the new episodes. And guess what? It sucked.

"I've toyed around with ChatGPT a bit," Brooker said in the new issue of Empire. "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 sh*t."

As Brooker soon realized, the program didn't actually come up with anything good; it just essentially googled the show and spat out everything that already existed. "Because all it's done is 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.'"

"It's [1970s impressionist] Mike Yarwood — there's a topical reference," Brooker joked, referring to the British impressionist.

While this exercise maybe sounds like it didn't really go anywhere — and also seems like it directly contradicts the WGA's current requests from major studios to rule out the use of AI in writer's rooms — it turns out that Brooker got help in a weird way, and a way that seems totally appropriate for the twisted mind behind the entirety of "Black Mirror."

What ChatGPT did help him with is realizing he was in a bit of a writing rut. "I was aware that I had written lots of episodes where someone goes 'Oh, I was inside a computer the whole time!'" Brooker said. "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."

Brooker told the magazine that the realization was a "nice, cold glass of water in the face," but in the end, it helped him get more creative... which means fans can probably prepare to be completely freaked out over the new batch of episodes.

So what can fans expect from Brooker's new, inspired "Black Mirror" episodes? He talks a little bit about one of them, "Beyond the Sea," which features Kate Mara, Aaron Paul, and Josh Hartnett. Set in an alternate-universe version of 1969, Brooker says the episode is basically unstuck in time, and that getting out of his rut helped him get more creative with this installment. 

"I had the plot idea first and then, at one point, I thought [adopts the voice of a TV-making moron], 'What if I set this in the late '60s? That'd be, like, disruptive and cool!' And then when you actually come to write it, you realise, 'Oh, hang on, if this is a different time and everyone in it is from that time, that actually informs how the characters are thinking and behaving.' But I don't think there was a deliberate rejection of nostalgia, so much as it was just a fun thing to do."

Beyond those three stars, the new season features Salma Hayek Pinault, Annie Murphy, Michael Cera, and more, and it arrives on Netflix to unsettle everyone on June 15, 2023.