Black Mirror has spent the last dozen years preying on tech fears. The British show has scaremongered about clones, about various terrifying eye-related gizmos, about social media, about choose-your-own adventure games, about sociopaths who bully their way into elected office. Some of it has even already come true! But there’s one dangerous tech that show creator Charlie Brooker isn’t losing much sleep over. And believe it or not, it’s AI.
Per The Guardian, Brooker appeared at a SXSW even in Sydney Wednesday, where he elaborated upon a story he told earlier this year, in which he asked ChatGPT to produce a Black Mirror episode. It didn’t go well.
At first he was on edge, saying that “the first couple of sentences you feel a cold spike of fear, like animal terror,” like he was “being f*cking replaced.”
Alas, his anxiety was short-lived. “Then as it carries on you go, ‘Oh this is boring. I was frightened a sec ago, now I’m bored because this is so derivative,’” Brooker recalled. He went on:
“It’s just emulating something. It’s Hoovered up every description of every<em> Black Mirror</em> episode, presumably from Wikipedia and other things that people have written, and it’s just sort of vomiting that back at me. It’s pretending to be something it isn’t capable of being.”
While Brooker acknowledged that AI is here to stay, it can’t be used for everything.
“I can’t quite see it replacing messy people,” Brooker said of AI’s ability to create something original.
So rest easy, writers of TV and movies and video games and whatnot. Or maybe don’t, because as Black Mirror has taught us, technology can always pull a fast one on messy humans.
(Via The Guardian)