If you thought Charlie Brooker, the sardonic mastermind behind the dystopian anthology series Black Mirror, might make for a pessimistic conversation partner, you’ve obviously never met me. “You’ve depressed me now!” he proclaims with mock indignation over Zoom. I didn’t mean to depress Charlie Brooker. All I did was tell him that ChatGPT was yielding new ways to destroy children’s dreams. Besides, he started it.
“The other day, my nine-year-old was doing a drawing and it was pretty good,” he’d began his anecdote. “I was saying, ‘You’ve got a talent’, and he was really chuffed. Of course then I thought, ‘With those AI things though, you’re not going to get a job as an illustrator are you? When you're at an employable age, that’s going to be coming out of a great big computer’s arse’. But I didn’t say that.”
Before we veered into AI, talk began with how on earth Brooker stays optimistic – given that for more than the past decade, he’s been bringing foreboding technological and psychological horrors to life through varying degrees of dark episodes of Black Mirror.
“I definitely approached this [forthcoming sixth] season thinking, ‘Whatever my assumptions are about Black Mirror, I’m going to throw them out and do something different’,” he says of the five-episode instalment. Brooker was drawn to including more comedy in the new season, largely because “it feels like the dystopia is lapping onto our shores at the present moment”.
But don’t be fooled by this comedic inflection. “I sort of circled back to some classically Black Mirror stories as well,” says Brooker. “So it’s not like it’s a bed of roses this season. They’re certainly some of the bleakest stories we’ve ever done.”
Ahead of the new series premiering on Netflix, we sat down with Brooker to chat about all things Black Mirror in 2023, what ChatGPT means for the future, and, er, human shit.
The new series is described as ‘the most unpredictable, unclassifiable and unexpected yet’. How have you pushed boundaries with it?
I got a bit bored of writing [episodes where it] pulls out to reveal that they’re all inside a computer, so one of the things I wanted to do was really shake up what the show is. We’ve done some episodes that have really big swings, and another episode that’s one of the most comedic ones we’ve ever done. There’s definitely an out-and-out comedy with a really good comedy cast. I think you see the full breadth of Black Mirror – some of them are classically Black Mirror and some of them are a different beast.
There’s an episode about a streaming service making a show out of a woman’s life (“Joan is Awful”) and one about intrusive paparazzi (“Mazey Day”). Black Mirror is often talked about as being about bad tech, but are the media as much the villain too?
Yes, I’d say so. That was another thing [I did before writing this season] – I went back and looked at really early episodes. “The National Anthem”, the first episode in the first season, has social media in it and videos being uploaded to YouTube, but really it’s about 24-hour news. And then “15 Million Merits” is a parody of talent shows and the media in general, and sort of gets at parasocial living.
Were there any specific news stories that inspired the new series?
One episode was specifically inspired by The Dropout, the Elizabeth Holmes thing, which was good. But I watched that and was like, ‘Imagine if you were her’. It’s got Stephen Fry in, and I thought that’d be so odd if that was your life. So that unlocked something I was already thinking about. The paparazzi episode, I think there’s some clear parallels with things that happened to famous people way back yonder. Specific news stories, though, not really. What I tend to do instead is [think up] an idea for something that I hope doesn’t happen. But also when I was writing it, there wasn’t really anything on the news except everyone staying at home.
We’re at a transitional moment in technological advancement with AI-generated art and ChatGPT obviously the big things. What’s your take on them?
There is [an episode] that – without giving anything away – is to do with computer-generated, on-the-fly imagery, which you’re seeing all over the place now. That was the first wave, when people were going, ‘Hey, look at this, I can ‘type Denis Nilson the serial killer in the Bake Off tent’ into Midjourney and it’ll spit out some eerily, quasi-realistic images of that’, or ‘Here’s Mr Blobby on a water slide’, or ‘Paul McCartney eating an olive’.
Revolutionary stuff!
That’s all fascinating. With ChatGPT when I first encountered it, I was like, ‘Oh my god, that’s it, my job done’. But now having toyed with it a bit more, you can see the limitations. There’s a generic quality to the art that it pumps out. It’ll be undeniably perfect in five years, but at what point it’ll replace the human experience? I don’t know if that’ll ever come. Obviously the first thing I did was [ask it] to come up with a Black Mirror episode to see what it would do. What it came out with was simultaneously too generic and dull for any serious consideration. It does feel now like we’re at the foothills of new, disruptive technology kicking in again. There won’t be much of a run-up, it’ll happen in an afternoon. Wednesday it’ll be fine; then on Thursday we’ll be sharing the planet with something that outclasses us in terms of intelligence and ability by a factor of 500,000 per cent; and then it’ll probably just dissemble all matter and turn us into goo.
You spend your life writing about, in your words, “worry fantasies”. How do you stay optimistic about the future?
Who says I do? (Laughs). I struggle with that. I guess having kids now, I have to try and be more optimistic, or certainly whisper if I’m saying something as grim as what I just said. But the pandemic: we fucked it up, but we got through it… So I do keep hoping things will get better. That makes me sound like an optimist, doesn’t it? But, yeah, I don’t really have an answer to that. I should ask ChatGPT; see what it says.
Post-pandemic, is there an element of feeling as if we’re performing the life we lived before, even though everything’s changed?
It does feel like the dystopia is lapping onto the shores of the present moment; lots of people say it’s like we’re living in a Black Mirror episode, so there’s certainly a sense of looking in the rearview. We’re looking at an alternative past, though, so in a way I’m having my cake and eating it. We have eradicated lots of diseases and generally lots of things are going well that we lose sight of but it’s just a bit terrifying if you think democracy is going to collapse. That and the climate breaking down.
I’m so old now that I can remember living through other periods, like in the 80s being convinced that I was going to be extinguished at any moment by a nuclear bomb, [watching] public information films about digging a hole in your backyard and waiting to die. That didn’t quite happen! The other thing I would say, I do have faith in the fact that the younger generation seem to have their heads screwed on and seem to be pissed off. So that’s going to be a tsunami of people, it’s just that they’re not at the levers of power yet.
How has the pandemic affected our memories?
It became a big smear, didn’t it? Normally your ability to form memories, a lot of it is where you were. So you’d go, ‘Do you remember I told you that thing when we were standing outside Tesco’. During the pandemic, it was like, ‘I was standing in the living room looking at you with cold resentment when…’ That’d be the start of everything.
BeReal and its mundane daily photos are an interesting reaction to that.
I’m of a generation where I don’t understand photographing everything. Every day it tells you to take a photo?
Yeah, you get two minutes every day to take a picture.
It should do something more than that. Shouldn’t it just do it without you knowing? It should be a little drone that flies out of a cupboard, photographs and questions you, and won't let you leave. You know [Apple’s] ‘on this day’ memory thing that the phone throws at you? I’m sure everyone’s had this experience. Once it said, ‘Here’s a new memory for you’, and I looked, and it was a photograph of some shit in a toilet bowl because one of my kids had done a poo that I was worried about and had photographed to show it to a doctor. It was like, ‘Here you go, walk down memory lane’. Fuck BeReal, that’s really real!
See Charlie Brooker at GQ Heroes in Oxfordshire, from 19-21 July, in association with BMW UK. For more info and tickets, visit GQHeroes.com
