Surely the ultimate Black Mirror move would’ve been filming ChatGPT’s awful Black Mirror episode?

Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker recently sat down with Empire to talk about the new season of techno-horror show (coming to Netflix on June 15), and he dropped a shocking reveal that is more shocking than anything in an actual Black Mirror episode: He tried to get the ChatGPT chatbot to write an episode of Black Mirror, and the end result was “shit.” Wait no, that’s not the shocking thing. Of course something written by AI is going to be shit. The shocking thing is that Brooker didn’t go through with it and actually film the AI-written episode, which could’ve been incredible.

Listen, we’re not going to tell Charlie Brooker how to make Black Mirror (we don’t have the stomach for it anyway, that show’s so sad!), but we have to ask: Shouldn’t that be the point? Wouldn’t the ultimate Black Mirror episode be one that is fully written by an AI and totally sucks shit because of it? What could possibly be a bigger and clearer “technology is bad, actually” story than one that is written by technology and is bad?

Imagine an episode where a pretty famous person is using a computer, and then the computer says something evil like “I killed your family and replaced them with computers,” and then the famous person is like “oh no!” and then the camera pulls back and we see Charlie Brooker watching the episode. He says “hey sorry, this one was bad. Do you know why? An AI wrote it! You’ve been Black Mirror’d!”

Okay, that doesn’t sound very good, so maybe he’s right. Brooker told Empire that the ChatGPT episode read “plausibly” at first glance, but when he took another look it was clear that all the AI had done was “look up all the synopses of Black Mirror episodes and sort of mush them together” (which, let’s be clear, is all that an AI like this does when you ask it for anything, since it can’t meaningfully create anything that is actually new).

But, as Brooker explains in the Empire piece, that experience did force him to recognize some Black Mirror tropes that he wanted to avoid in the show’s new season, noting, “There’s no point in having an anthology show if you can’t break your own rules.” That most likely means fewer episodes where someone finds out they were “inside a computer the whole time” (as he puts it) and more episodes with some kind of new-to-the-show twist (there’s an episode that takes place in an alternate version of 1969, which is definitely new for this show).