‘Black Mirror’ Creator Charlie Brooker Warns Studios Could Use AI for Script Notes

Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker might be between seasons of making his dystopian Netflix hit, but the writer is still thinking of novel ways that technology might dampen our future.

Hollywood writers often dread getting notes from studio executives about their scripts. But Brooker sees a way this creative process could get even worse — if executives start showing their scripts to an AI model.

Speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival, Brooker described a scenerio where scripts would be fed into a machine that could produce an animated rough cut (an “AI animatic”) of the film from which studio changes could be suggested.

“That felt plausible to me, because basically the script becomes a prompt,” the British writer told the audience, in comments first reported by Deadline and confirmed by a Festival representative. “That worries me.”

That said, Brooker said he’s not worried that writers will be outright replaced by AI as a machine model can’t replace the nuances of writing from a human experience (“I hope there’s still a job for keeping keyboards warm with flesh,” he said).

In comments reported elsewhere, Brooker added that fans have told him they preferred the anthology drama when it was a British production and “didn’t have Americans in it” and the ending were more consistently dire.

“Every episode had been bleak and horrible and had a bleak, horrible ending, and then the show was going to Netflix,” he recalled. “Sometimes people say to me, ‘I prefer it when it didn’t have Americans in it and everyone had bad teeth …. and the worst thing ever happened to them, and then they died. Can you do that please?’ … Netflix never said, ‘Could you make this a bit more jolly and American?’ I was just thinking, if I just did nothing but down endings, A, that’s really predictable and B, I’ll get very bored. So the first episode I wrote for Netflix was called ‘San Junipero.’”

“I was sort of experimenting and thinking ‘Can I write an optimistic story?’” he recalled. “What happens if I do that?’ It was terrifying. [And] it was one of our most popular (episodes) ever that we’ve done.”

The seventh season of Black Mirror was released in April and was celebrated as largely being a return to form for the show. That said, there’s been no official word on an eighth season.