Is “Black Mirror” creator Charlie Brooker worried about GenAI? Well, he told The Hollywood Reporter that most of the series’ conceits are examples of him “worrying out loud” about the state of the world.
Brooker is known for his prescience, but his powers may have peaked with season six’s “Joan Is Awful,” depicting how an AI-driven TV show causes the lives of a businesswoman and the actress portraying her to go awry. Now streaming on Streamberry!
“Of all the episodes we’ve ever done, the timeliness of it absolutely couldn’t have been more spooky,” Brooker tells THR’s Jackie Strause.
According to Brooker, the episode “started out as a terms and conditions gag.” He explains, “The intention at the time was not to comment on actors, it was a comment on the rights you unthinkingly sign away when you hit ‘Accept’ on all sort of devices.
“With Alexa devices, you have to agree that your voice recordings will be uploaded somewhere — and God knows what’s going on there.”
Brooker says he drafted the screenplay in the summer of 2022 and then shot it “just before ChatGPT launched.”
The episode stars “Annie Murphy and Salma Hayek [who] were already concerned about this sort of thing,” Brooker said. “It was already on their radar. Especially as a female actor, fake images pop up, and for a while, I was already thinking about deepfake stuff.”
But with ChatGPT’s emergence, “Suddenly, everyone was talking about generative AI and how all creative jobs were going to be replaced, pushed out or automated,” Brooker continues. “There’s also a lot of raw animal panic that takes over as a writer as soon as you see some of that generative AI output.
The episode, directed by Ally Pankiw, also debuted one month into the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike and a month prior to the SAG-AFTRA work stoppage.
“When the ChatGPT conversation caught fire and when it became a huge issue because of the strikes, I was slightly wiping my brow with relief that we got the episode out before. The timing of it was surreal. Hopefully, it added to the conversation.”
READ MORE: Charlie Brooker on Predicting the Future, ‘Black Mirror’ Season 7 and His “USS Callister” Sequel (The Hollywood Reporter)
“Joan Is Awful,” observes IndieWire’s Harrison Richlin, “became a touchstone for artists raising alarms on the entertainment industry’s new investment into AI programs like ChatGPT and Midjourney.”
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