Anti-AIPerson

Charlie Brooker

Black Mirror Creator

The satirist behind Black Mirror, television’s darkest tech anthology. Had ChatGPT write him an episode in 2023 and pronounced the result “shit” — boring, derivative, mushed-together synopses — though he concedes AI could yet be “an incredible tool.”

Author

Wikipedia

In his words

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 shit.

— Empire, 2023

Oh this is boring. I was frightened a sec ago, now I’m bored because this is so derivative.

— SXSW Sydney, 2023

Biography

Charlie Brooker (born 1971) built a career skewering media as a Guardian columnist and the creator of Screenwipe before Black Mirror (2011–) made him the poet laureate of technological dread. The anthology’s speculative nightmares — social-credit scoring, digital consciousness, synthetic likenesses — kept arriving early enough that reality is regularly accused of plagiarizing it.

The ChatGPT experiment

Ahead of Black Mirror’s sixth season, Brooker told Empire in June 2023 that he had typed “generate Black Mirror episode” into ChatGPT. The output read plausibly at first glance and fell apart at the second: the model had simply looked up episode synopses and “mush[ed] them together,” with no original thought underneath. He described the experience at SXSW Sydney that October as a rapid trip from “animal terror” to tedium — “I was frightened a sec ago, now I’m bored because this is so derivative” — concluding the machine was “pretending to be something it isn’t capable of being” and that he could not “quite see it replacing messy people.”

Brooker’s position has stayed characteristically double-edged. Season 7 (2025) engages AI on multiple fronts, and he has acknowledged the technology could be “an incredible tool” for creativity and medicine while confessing new anxieties — telling Deadline in August 2025 that he dreads studios generating notes from AI mock-ups of scripts. Fear of replacement, in his telling, gave way to something more corrosive: AI as the world’s most confident mediocre collaborator.