‘Black Mirror’ creator says he “toyed around” with ChatGPT for the new season, but pulled the plug

The dark side of technology is Black Mirror‘s stock-in-trade, so it makes sense that creator Charlie Brooker is keeping up with the headline-grabbing AI technology.

He tells Empire he has “toyed around with ChatGPT quite a bit,” and even tried to get it to write an episode for the Netflix show’s forthcoming sixth season.

“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 s***,” he tells the magazine.

“All it’s done is look up all the synopses of Black Mirror episodes, and sort of mush them together,” he adds. “Then, if you dig a bit more deeply you go, ‘Oh, there’s not actually any real original thought here.'”

However, the experience wasn’t a total loss. Brooker admits it made him take a hard look at what episodes had come before.

“I was aware that I had written lots of episodes where someone goes ‘Oh, I was inside a computer the whole time!'” he tells the magazine with a laugh.

“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. Just a sort of nice, cold glass of water in the face.”

Brooker had previously told Netflix’s new blog TUDUM of the new season, “I’ve always felt that Black Mirror should feature stories that…keep surprising people — and myself — or else what’s the point?”

The series — written by human hands — will return in June, starring Emmy winner Aaron Paul, Salma Hayek Pinault, Ben Barnes, Danny Ramirez, Kate Mara, Zazie Beetz, and more.