Black Mirror's Charlie Brooker on the problem with tech - and people

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This is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also the chief correspondent at Business Insider. And today I'm on vacation. Maybe you are too. But I still wanted to give you some content. So today we are going vintage.

with the help of Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker. I talked to Charlie Brooker a couple of years ago when Netflix was streaming the sixth season of Black Mirror, which was excellent. The show is now on its seventh season, and it is also excellent. And I think this conversation about the way Brooker sees tech and why so many of the dystopian visions he creates on his show seem to be embraced as utopian visions by tech moguls remains as sadly relevant as ever. And also...

Charlie Brooker is smart and charming in English, so you're going to like this one. I guarantee it or your money back. Okay, here's me and Charlie Brooker. I'm talking with Charlie Brooker, the creator of Black Mirror. It is one of the all-time great shows. I'm delighted to talk to him. Welcome, Charlie. Hello. Nice to be here. I appreciate it. The newest season of Black Mirror debuted a couple months ago. I'm sure you are exhausted talking about it, but I want to use it as a jumping off.

point for our discussion. If you've watched any of the new season of Black Mirror, you realize that it's different from other seasons. Many of the episodes are less explicitly about technology and its perils or promise.

Is that because you're sick of talking about tech? No, I think, I mean, to be honest, so the... The season, the order of episodes that this season six appears on Netflix is the reverse order to the order they were written in.

um and and it started out to be to be frank it started out i was doing a i was almost doing a different season i wanted to take a bit of a break from doing stuff about just technology because i kind of felt like i was boxing myself in a little And so there was a deliberate move to set some episodes in the past and do some sort of horror stories and to put out a season called Red Mirror and do it that way, like do a sort of sister reboot in a way.

Then, as is always the case, I think, when you're doing any kind of creative endeavor, as soon as you cut yourself off from doing something, you're then slightly pining to do it immediately. So actually... I sort of reverted back to Black Mirror. And you can see that throughout. If you look at the episodes in reverse order, they get steadily more and more Black Mirror as they go. So by the time Joan is awful, it's the first episode.

in order for the last one to be made. There's going to be a test on this afterwards. Sorry, yeah, this is very, I made this unnecessarily convoluted. That was the most black memory of them all. But I think what it was, was at the time when I started... During that particular season, I was aware that... I was aware, obviously, that Black Mirror had become kind of synonymous for sort of tech dystopia. Yeah.

and things of that nature. And I was getting people saying to me, oh, I bet you're going to do it. What? Are you going to do an episode about NFTs and, you know, the blockchain and stuff like that? And I just think, oh, that's so depressing because that was never what the... what the purpose of the show was way back when, when it first started. The idea was not to be, let's satirise the tech pages.

You know, it was much more, I want to do this show that's unlike any other show on television and I want to do something that speaks about now or satirises. the media and the culture and our society, but is not necessarily, you know, I wasn't, I wasn't thinking, but it's all about technology. So I was slightly, and I was aware that I felt like I,

trod familiar territory quite a few times in Black Mirror, so I wanted to really shake things up. Also back then, that was in the midst of the pandemic, in the grip of the pandemic, and really it kind of felt at the time like a lot of the tech. was plateauing a bit. Hence, people saying to me, are you going to do an episode about NFTs? There wasn't that much. It didn't feel like there was that much disruption going on so much as

People stretching for something new, but there wasn't. Desperate for anything new, we'd have loved it. But the newest thing was using Zoom, like everything happening on Zoom was basically it. And so it was also, so it kind of felt like things had slightly plateaued at the time. as you start emerging from it now we're at a point like where everyone's talking about ai everyone's talking about elon musk everyone's talking about there's all of a lot of those things are are now

heating up again. So I kind of feel like I got that out of my system, if you see what I mean. What it meant was I put several classic Black Mirror ideas on the back burner a little. How do you feel about the fact that people use...

Black Mirror as shorthand for tech dystopia. I was looking, I was like, I do that all the time. I did it in print in June when Apple rolled out its Apple Vision Pro goggles and it had that video of the mom wearing the headset. set and her daughter is trying to talk to her and it seems terrible, but Apple thinks this is great. What do you think of the idea that I see that and go, oh, that's Black Mirror and everyone else, lots of other people do as well.

I mean, I kind of love it, actually. Like I say, as soon as I sort of restricted myself from doing something, I was pining for it and came back to it. And so doing an episode like... Joan is Awful, which is like a sort of AI-generated show is at the heart of that. That yields so deliciously Black Mirror to me. I kind of love that stuff. I mean, I say I love it.

I'm delighted, obviously, that it's become shorthand, because on the one hand, that's kind of free publicity for the show, frankly. But equally, it's...

It's often depressing on a human level that that's the stuff we're looking at and confronted by a lot of the time. And it's interesting because it's not just... It's not always people... And this was a thing I was kind of leaning into, I guess, this season. It's not always about technology. When people say that, sometimes they're talking about just a...

I don't know if I can use, I'm not, I will use clean language. No, no, curse it up. Oh, okay. A fucked up situation. Basically people will often sort of use it for short and for a fucked up situation. If you look at our first ever episode with the prime minister and the pig. That's the very definition of a sort of fucked up situation. And so Black Mirror simultaneously, to me, seems to stand in for that, that kind of situation. And also, yes, as you say, if Apple launched their vision.

Stupid or whatever they are. $500,000 flipping icon goggles. What do you make of the fact that you've been making this show for more than a decade? And it's very popular. So, you know, clearly people in Silicon Valley have seen it. And you're saying this vision of the future that I have is bad. This is this is not good.

And then they come out and say, we think this is great. We're going to productize this, whether it's VR goggles or AI generated people or whatever it is. And you've been saying, no, this is explicitly bad. And they go, this. is great we're going to sell it what do you make of that disconnect i would say so one thing i would say there is that i don't know that okay sometimes clearly in the show i'm highlighting something and saying this is bad

Usually, however, the technology isn't actually the villain. We've done an episode, definitely, we did an episode with autonomous robot killer dogs going around killing people. Positive. Not... Really a positive read on that, but they were still presumably created by a human in that story. We just don't say. Most of the time, when an episode is what I would class as classically Black Mirror, you've got something that's actually quite miraculous.

that you can immediately see as a viewer, you can see the desirability of it. You can see why it would be useful. You can see why it would be transformative and in many ways, extremely positive. And it's usually the human beings.

the messy human beings who are using this stuff in the story, who managed to balls things up. And I guess that reflects how I feel about a lot of things, because in real life, I'm pretty geeky and techy. I used to be a video games journalist way back. yonder in the 90s and i i kind of love all this stuff i love technology i love computers and but i'm also a natural worrier i'm somebody who catastrophizes

At the drop of a hat, it may come as no surprise to anyone who's watched the show to realize that. And so I'm often worried about, you know, the power we suddenly at some new development or gizmo will give us. the power and the responsibility that comes with that and how easy it is to misuse that or just unintended consequences or obvious clumsy consequences. And we see that time and time again with things. But usually all technologies give with one hand.

And I was going to say take away, sort of slap us around the back of the head with the other. But that's been the case with every... I mean, the printing press. You know, it's been the case with everything. It's like, I wouldn't want to put this stuff... I wouldn't want to delete this stuff from existence, necessarily.

We were talking before we started taping about, you know, you started this show. This show started airing in the UK in 2011. And I'm remembering, I'm thinking a lot about what... that was like back then, how we viewed tech back then generally, especially in the tech press, but broadly, you know, we were excited about consumer technology. There was an iPhone or Facebook or Twitter. There were serious people saying that social media

could bring democracy to the Middle East, etc. Enormously optimistic about it. Things have swung back dramatically in the opposite direction. Do you think that was always inevitable that we would go from tech is great to tech brings

on catastrophe? Or do you think there was another way to have gone about this? I mean, whether it was inevitable that we went from... It's certainly that we were clearly looking at it through... extremely rose tinted goggles at the time and and you're absolutely right i remember that was that was the thing in a way i was tapping into in my head in some it's certainly in some of those

early episodes, it launched against the backdrop for me. I would watch adverts. There would be adverts for, like, most Apple adverts looked to me like, have you seen Soylent Green? Of course. So, you know there's a scene, is it? Who is it? Is it Ernest Borgnine? Who plays the old guy? Or is it Burgess Meredith? I think it's Ernest Borgnine who plays the old guy. All I remember is Charlton Heston at the end, frankly. Right.

Well, of course. Well, we all remember the punchline, but there's a bit where somebody is euthanized. An old guy is euthanized and he's taken into a sort of euthanasia clinic. And the last thing he's shown is images of the natural world, which has now been destroyed. And it sort of moves him to tears. And then he's like killed.

tending to food, basically. Which someone in Silicon Valley thought would be a good brand. Oh, yes, exactly. Yes. Which is amazing. So, I mean, well, there you go. I mean, that's the... ultimate sort of example. But that's the imagery there.

the sort of pleasant imagery that this guy was showing against this extremely dystopian black backdrop. That was the sense I was always getting from sort of Apple ads at the time, was they just seemed to be showing everybody having fun and dancing and smiling. And you just think, well, hang on a minute.

usually aren't this positive. And if we suddenly have extremely powerful tools at our disposal, we will do incredible things. We will also make incredible fuck-ups. So that seemed to me... a well-founded concern i had that i felt wasn't reflected at the time wasn't being reflected necessarily in... And I remember the Arab Spring. I was doing a... My background in the UK is in comedy and stuff like that. So I was doing stuff for a topical comedy show at the time.

And I remember the positivity around the Arab Spring and people feeling that Twitter was bringing, exactly as you say, democracy to the Middle East. And now that all seems extremely naive. I think it was always inevitable that we were going to cock things up a bit. I wouldn't want to be just completely cynical. The analogy I always use is that, especially something like social media or a lot of this stuff, it's like we've suddenly grown an extra limb.

You know, which is amazing because it means you could juggle and scroll through your iPhone at the same time. But it also means that we're not really sure how to control it yet. And we're clumsy. You know, we're not knocking things over all the time. We're still... grappling with sort of butterfly effect consequences of this stuff all the time so the problem is it probably wasn't inevitable but i think it was a lot of it was probably

hard to foresee, do you know what I mean, without necessarily putting things completely back in the box and being a total Luddite. I do get frustrated sometimes when sometimes people sometimes characterize the show as... you know, the tech is bad show sort of thing. And I think sometimes I react to that probably too much. There's probably something I was doing this season. There was a deliberate sort of like, I'm not going to do that for a while. But I don't know.

I'm trying to think what we could have done between 2011 and now to mitigate against things. Well, I guess we could have all been a bit more suspicious. We should have all been more paranoid. I don't know how we could have. I mean, you know, so much of the backlash was so directly tied to Donald Trump's election. And I believe our desire to.

pin that on something and someone other than ourselves and our citizens who said, I want to vote for Donald Trump. So lots of us wanted to blame Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook. Some of us wanted to blame Fox News, and they all have some responsibility. With Brexit here, there was a definite desire to pin it on Cambridge Analytica and pin it on that this is a sort of psyops campaign, that people have somehow been magically persuaded by machines.

to think like this but i kind of i mean essentially things like brexit well actually brexit was something i didn't see coming i just didn't i didn't see that coming donald trump i felt like i saw that coming like he seemed obvious to me really early on that he was going to win. There was something clear as day to me. I just thought, well, of course he will. He's like, of course he will. He's a celebrity who's interesting.

And he's pissing people off. Of course, there's a huge number of people who are going to vote for him.

Yeah, in retrospect, it seems like an obvious culmination in things. I know you get this question all the time, but when you have Donald Trump's in the world, when you have Elon Musk's in the world, these crazy outsize. people who are characters, you know, What does that do for you as a creator? Do you think, I can't touch this stuff. There's literally nothing else you could say. These things are beyond parody. Or do you go, this is something I really want to mine or none of the above?

I don't know. I mean, so it's interesting because with, say, Trump, and there's a lot of parallels between Trump and Boris Johnson here in the UK. It's just messed with my head, Boris Johnson, by buying a giant mansion in this tiny village that I grew up in, by the way. Now he's a notable resident on the Wikipedia page, really messing with me. But... We kind of covered that there was something that I didn't feel I got the script right. There's an episode of Black Mirror called The Waldo Moment.

in 2013, where I was trying to get at something that was very much, I was looking at Boris Johnson, who was mayor of London and was, and had... and was a TV personality. Like, he'd been on comedy, satirical, he'd been a guest on comedy shows and things like this, and he was widely regarded as a sort of bumblet, like Paddington Bear, like a sort of prototype Paddington that's...

posh and slept outdoors in a field for a couple of days. But I was slightly fascinated by the fact that he seemed bulletproof in terms of the fact that he fucked up.

and was bumbling and kept... Was built into the character. Was built into the character and was a definite plus. And that he appealed to people on the basis of him being a sort of... disruptive personality because there was a widespread sense that all politicians were these bland cookie cutter, I guess in the UK were kind of echoing Blair. Basically, but they all seemed a bit like... They could have been from The Sims or something. Do you know what I mean? They all seemed like...

like a bland neighbor in a bad dramas. Yeah. I think of them in the U S as, as people, as, as news, as news anchors, news presenters, you would call them there. Yeah. And kind of, and, and, and daytime news, like, like doing a sort of like coffee morning. type show. So he was so clearly a different flavor. He was unique. And there was something about the thought that...

that a lot of people would find that attractive. And it was obvious why they would find that attractive because all the politicians they had weren't really speaking to them and didn't appear to be representing them. And that there was something very... I found very frightening about that situation that hopefully we covered in that episode. And I think...

At the time, I felt like I didn't get the script right. I didn't get the stakes in the story right. I could have written it a lot better. That actually should have been a miniseries, weirdly, that particular episode, I think. But it looked more prescient.

Come 2016, come Trump getting elected or Boris getting elected, it looked, it suddenly seemed quite prescient. And I think now it is difficult because in a way, the new cliche is for the sort of like... a tech bro boss to be an Elon Musk type person who, you know, probably...

rides into the office on a little e-scooter and you know with tattoos on his face and pissing in the corner and like crazy yeah elon musk posted a photo of himself with a t-shirt yesterday that and the joke is if the t-shirt the way he's got his his jacket over it says i love anal

Right. That's the joke. He put that up and he's, you know, one of the richest men in the world. I mean, maybe he does. I don't, I don't, I don't judge that. I just, the idea that like, it seems beyond like he's, and he wants to be funny. Right. But he's, so he's beyond. to be funny that's the boris johnson held his own actually on sort of comet like it was a it was a in on comedy panel shows people

clearly warm to him because they thought he came across a bumbling eye. Trump is sort of, I guess, inadvertently funny, but also more terrifying. Elon Musk is... trying very hard to be funny a lot of the time, isn't it? As far as I can tell. As a professional funny person, when you see that, what's your reaction? It's just not very good. It's like...

It's a bit Rupert Pupkin, isn't it? In one respect. It's weird, isn't it? Because if he was genuinely very funny, I'm just querying myself here. If he was genuinely very funny, would I like him? There's something I think... I don't know. I don't... I don't know. I always used to say I don't think right-wingers are funny, except for... Oh, no, it's not true that right-wingers aren't funny. Have you ever seen that picture of Mussolini hanging from the lamppost?

That's fucking hilarious. Trump actually has some, he's not a comedian, but he's got some of that performer in him. He's definitely, he's a consummate performer. Yeah, he's a consummate performer.

Do you get feedback from Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or Tim Cook or their underlings? Do they reach out to you with fan mail? Do they reach out to you and say, hey, don't make fun of me? No, I haven't heard from any of these people, actually, that I'm a... aware of i occasionally get asked to do like events or something like that i'm trying to think but no no i'm not not no we'll be right back with more charlie brooker but first a word from a sponsor

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And we're back. You mentioned AI at the beginning of this conversation. So in less space of a year, we went from look at this interesting AI arc. Isn't that cool or trippy? To, oh, AI could make a script with chat GPT to now maybe AI is going to make a whole. movie or a TV show. As someone who makes things, how do you think about AI as a tool and or as a threat? I think it's kind of both. So I do see that, I mean, it's depressing.

The thing that actually weirdly that depresses me almost more than anything else is like, I've got two kids and one of them's like, he's nine years old and he's getting into drawing and he's pretty, he's good. He's really good, especially for his age. He's like, I used to be a cartoonist. That was my first job. He's way better than I was as an adult. And, you know, he's proudly drawing doodling away. And I was looking at this thinking...

You know, and encouraging him, going, well done. And then I thought the next thought that arrived was, yeah, but I mean, being an illustrator, that's no career path these days, is it? Because that's going to be... And then our oldest, our eldest is really into coding. really into that and i'm like and i'm thinking yeah but are you learning is this like learning you know mathematics and now the calculator's come along and rendered that like we're just gonna a machine's just gonna do the

Icky bits of coding for you. So I do very much worry about what the impact on employment generally is going to be. And then when I look at like...

And I toyed around with all those things like mid-journey and stuff like that, like anyone else. And it's telling, isn't it, that what those things, the immediate images that go viral with that sort of thing and the things that are appealing are immediately like... kind of mashups aren't they they're all combinations of things so i i would type in like you know show me uh you know whatever jack the ripper in the great british bake-off tent

Or something like that. Show me Boris Johnson shaking hands with Paddington Bear on the set of Seinfeld or something. But because it's parasitically hoovering up. stuff that we humans have made or created or are. And so quite quickly, it's interesting with the AIR, I feel like there's quite quickly something generic about it. Either it was like riffs on existing IP, effectively, or it was fairly somehow sort of too slick.

like an auto-tuned vocal. Right, you can sort of, yeah, you can see it. Yeah. You can see the auto-tune. And it's impressive, but it's weird. That said, and then things like ChatGPT, I can see, I can totally see. The value in using it as a sort of hyper-powered Google, using it as a kind of, oh, quick, list 10 jobs that somebody in Victorian England might have done.

I can imagine that as a writing tool. And I can imagine it being a little... Well, I can imagine people using it. The scary thing is I can imagine people using it to generate something that they... then claim to own, which isn't good enough to actually pass muster that you'd have to then hire a human in cheaply to knock into shape. So there's that. But I mean, I guess it's like the tool, it should be like the tools in Photoshop. Right? Do you know what I mean? No one...

I'm not scared by most of the tools in Photoshop. I think they're super useful for artists, digital artists. The interesting thing is hopefully one outcome is it makes us. up our game. It's interesting at the moment, I think, isn't it, that we've had a lot of formulaic movies and stuff for years, I feel like. Not to slight superhero movies, it's just that there's a lot of them.

And the audience seems to have exhausted. The audience seems to have exhausted because I think that it does feel like you could say to chat GPT, knock out the beats of a superhero. You know what the story beats going to be. Do you imagine using it?

I mean, I've talked to folks who say, yeah, it's a good, it's good to make a terrible first draft because that gives me, I'd rather look at a bad first draft than a blank page and I can fix something or I can kick around ideas and a hundred ideas will be bad, but one will be good.

and that's useful for me. Well, A, I don't know that it's... I don't think it's at the point where it could write an even servicing... Not even a vomit draft. I don't think it could really do at the moment. I mean, I... The first thing I did when I got it was try to get it to do unacceptable things, right? So I'd sort of say, okay, generate a transcript of the Beatles.

sitting around and coming up with a song about going to the toilet and use really explicit language and this, that and the other, and then have them actually start going to the toilet in the studio. And then George Martin comes in and eventually...

Even though it would keep saying, I'm not going to do that. I'm a good little AI and I won't do that. Eventually, you could always get... trick it into doing it god bless you charlie brooke and it would do it but it would keep trying to bring the conversation background to how hey guys you know hey ringo we shouldn't really do this should we no let's get back to peace it was sort of black now

But also, I kind of feel like it's... I don't know that I trust its ability to generate an idea. Now, riffing on an idea that you've got yourself, I can... potentially see that but because it's hoovering up other people's stuff i got miss i got slightly misquoted because there wasn't obviously another thing i did was i typed in like Okay, go on, then tell me an idea. Give me an idea for a Black Mirror episode. And I wasn't doing that because I wanted one.

so much as I wanted to see what the competition is from this machine. And what it does is it immediately came back with things that sounded on the face of it.

It's certainly been pitched worse things, I think. Or not worse, but things that are similar. It came up with things that were fairly generic because they were... It was what... what a what a what a little bit of emulation software's idea of a black mirror story is if you see what i mean so it was sort of trying to do that and and that just made me feel kind of self

parasitic if there's a phrase for bit like it felt like oh why am i why am i doing that when well it's just leeching off me and i'd be quite close if somebody else was using it to leech off me and it's probably leeching off it's probably seen somewhere that black mirror is a bit like the twilight zone so it's probably leeching off rod serling as well it's probably leeching off

I don't know, Robocop, Starship Troopers, all these other brilliant things that I found very influential. And you did. As a human, you took all that stuff. I can see that argument as well. I can see, certainly, there's episodes of...

Black Mirror that are directly inspired, say, by... We did an episode called USS Callister, which is a sort of Star Trek story. And it's very directly... inspired by there's an episode of the twilight zone called um it's a good life where there's an ultra powerful he's played by a kid called billy moomy or guy bill bill moomy

And yeah, he's an ultra powerful sort of six-year-old boy or something like that who can... It's terrifying. And it still holds up today as absolutely chilling and terrifying. And at the point, I had the idea of like, oh, well, what if you've got to, you know, you've got to...

I was trying to think of, weirdly, a very different story idea to do with people in a workplace put into, originally I wanted them put into a musical, like a virtual musical, like Grease the musical, and they wouldn't know what their roles were.

So I might be Sandy and you might be Danny. We wouldn't know. The real us wouldn't know. And we have to sort of, it was a team building exercise. Anyway, I was sort of toying around with that idea. And then I thought, God, you could do so many powerful things. And as soon as I thought, well, what if this is a story about a tyrant? I remember that Twilight Zone episode in which he's like ultra. So now that is an example of me, I guess, parasitically hoovering up something that Rod Serling wrote.

Putting it through my own little AI in my brain, my own... I guess you just call it I, don't you? Not AI. There's nothing artificial about it. Just my eye. You created something wholly new. I watched it again last night. It's one of your best episodes. Oh, thank you. The most acclaimed episode. I think it's a very, I'm very proud of that.

episode. But I do think that's... Hopefully, that's a different process because A, I'm saying, well, I owe Rod Serling a debt there for... There was a heavy influence. I suppose this feels like this is doing it on an industrial scale. Right.

And so for someone like you, you recoil at that. As you know right now, there's a debate into the actor and writer strike about, you know, how much AI are we going to allow into our entertainment? I'm a little confused as to whether this is a real fear or a negotiating point. But do you think that that's a real fear for writers and actors?

that studios etc would really want to use ai to replace much of what they do i think it's a real fear the difficult thing is i think like i say i think i think the fear with writing is that it would be used You could use it, a studio could use it to generate vomit drafts of things and then hire in human writers to depressingly rewrite it, you know, make it human, humanize it.

And that's a very depressing state of affairs, the thought of that. Because if that's used to basically, that's simultaneously leeching off existing work by other writers, that it's hoovered up and... is trying to

But let me just take devil's advocate for a second, right? Because it's very standard in your business to have someone write a draft and then fire that person and then bring in multiple people many, multiple times to come in and make that draft better or oftentimes worse. And it goes and, you know. Well, I don't know, you see, because I've grown up in rosy old Britain, haven't I, where it's like quite different here. Like the ruthless sort of Hollywood side of writing looks terrifying to me.

I've had a very lucky existence as a writer. I've been exceptionally fortunate throughout my career that I was always allowed... I didn't... I came up through a weird route, basically. So I haven't... I haven't been there, if you said to me, like through that machine. So maybe I do have a... Maybe I've got too rosy-tinted a view, but I kind of feel like there's a difference here, isn't there, in hoovering? At least...

Like if a human executive has an idea for something that they want to hire someone to do, that seems fair enough to me. They've thought of it using their own brain, not they haven't sort of tasked a machine with... Going let's see what other humans have done and just automatically or to like churn out a list of a thousand things that may or may not be actionably similar to that, and then hire a human in cheaply to knock it into shape. That still feels like a real cheapening of that process.

No, it doesn't seem good. It also seems somewhat inevitable. You seem to think it's great. You seem to be saying that's wonderful and you can't wait for this to happen. They haven't made a good AI podcast yet. No, but they will. I mean, you'd think that. I mean, again, I mean, sure. the first line of jobs that could get replaced as a role of an executive who's assessing these things would probably be one of the first. But again, I mean...

Would people want to read it, listen to it, hear it, watch it? That's the thing I don't really... Yeah. That I still doubt. I still doubt. I can see... I can see the value, and there's all sorts of things. An eerie, I saw that thing that went viral the other week, which is an eerie sort of AI-generated. So somebody said, I've generated a trailer for Heidi, the movie. I don't know if you saw this. It was like Nightmares, like David Lynch.

It was like... Yeah. It really made you feel like your brain was being sick on itself on the inside looking at this thing. It was nightmarish imagery, like hilariously creepy. But a human has clearly been... So there's uses for it. I think if I was an actor, I would genuinely be worried about... Well, what I'd be worried about, I guess, is if I was an up-and-coming actor, what if I find myself perpetually...

in competition with, like, Tom Hanks or, you know, Marilyn Monroe? What happened? Like, what if you get a... But that presumes that a... I suppose for me to think that, that presumes that we're going to be interested in watching a CGI. We'd get invested in a CGI-generated Harrison Ford more than we would a young...

whoever the next Harrison Ford is going to be. And I don't know that we would. So to bring this all around, the first episode of this season is Joan is Awful, and it's a Netflix service called Screamberry. We're going to do this exact thing. What did Ted Sarandos have to say? I don't know what Ted Sarandos specifically had to say. I mean, he must have seen it. He must have seen it. So when I wrote that...

It's interesting because it happened slightly by degrees and that when I wrote it, the first script just said that Joan is watching a... A Netflix slash Disney Plus style streaming service is how it was described. Just a sort of generic streaming platform. Came up with the name Streamberry. And then it was when we came to...

Like when we were doing the graphics for the show, it's obviously, we had a really talented graphics team. They'd say, well, what do you want this to look like? And you realize you're asking them, it's a bit like, you know, when you're watching a drama and somebody's using Google, but it's not Google. You know, it's like a clearable version of Google. And it's always best when they just... Or the phone number is 555. Exactly. It slightly breaks your...

Or they're having to sort of make it look a bit shit so it doesn't look like the actual... Because actually, the front ends of most of these things are incredibly professionally done and look wonderful and they're instantly recognizable. So anyway, we just thought, well, why...

reinvent the wheel why don't we just see rather than having to make this bright orange or something so it doesn't look like any existing service why don't we just ask Netflix if we can make it look like this so we did and they said yes

And they're like, okay. And then later on, we're like, well, actually, well, if you're doing that, I mean, what happens when she presses play with the sort of like ribbons type animation? What would it do? It would, if it looks that much like Netflix, it would go, right? So can we use that? So we asked them if we could use that. And they said, yes. Again, I don't quite know how this exactly went up and down the chain and whether that's like asking somebody whose job is just to look at clearance.

and go, well, yeah, that's clearable because it's all on Netflix. Or whether there was a... There didn't seem to be any alarm or panic or anything like that about it. It's interesting because then when you get to the episode, when you're watching it, the final thing... It was sort of in a way when people said, well, my God, he's really having a pop at Netflix here. Do you think, oh, it does look like that, doesn't it? But really, it was sort of like...

It was, I mean, they were game for me doing that. And it was sort of, I mean, again, maybe because it's a slightly cartoony air. Yeah, it can't be that cutting if they allow it. Yeah. If you're watching it on Netflix, then it can't be that. It wouldn't be that dangerous because that's the message of season one, episode two, where somebody railing against the system gets.

commoditized commoditized yeah it becomes part of the sort of becomes another entertainment slot on the system um yeah there's that's depressing isn't it um but again it was sort of but but i think Also, timing-wise, you see, when writing that episode, it felt a bit more fanciful probably. It didn't feel like, oh, this is something we might be looking at in the next three years necessarily at the time. Because we wrapped that episode in like...

October 2022. And then November, I think, was when ChatGPT gets launched. Yes. And that's the point at which every writer on earth... At a moment of like, someone just walked over my grave, you know, it's sort of like, and you can, it just, I think everyone woke up and went, you know, hang on a minute, are we all replaceable here?

Charlie Brooker, you are not replaceable. You say that. It's interesting because there's lots of ideas I'm thinking about. We did an episode once before. We did an episode, could be right back, about Hayley Atwell and Donald Gleeson. That's in season two.

Hayley plays a woman who's called Martha, who's husband, played by Donald. He dies and she discovers after he's dead that she's pregnant and she really misses him. She wishes she could talk to him. She pays for the service that has gone through all his... his online footprint and he's generated a sort of AI she can talk to that's based on him. And then he becomes a sort of robotic version of himself that she's... And it's like a heartbreaking story.

It's one of my favorite episodes. I think an underrated episode. But it's a heartbreaking story. I realize now I missed a couple of tricks. One, I slightly am sad that we cut out... There was originally a scene in the script where when it's first talking to her, it starts asking for money. Like she has to upgrade it. It's basically starts advertising or something like that until she pays for the full fat version of it, basically.

Which was wonderfully cynical. And will happen, definitely. And then also, the other problem, in a way, was that he was based on his social media output. And he was bland. This is the problem she has, is he turns up and he's bland. And he's not as... Now, actually, now, if you were doing that, if it was somebody based on people's social media personalities...

It would either be like a game show host version of them has just walked in, or a very angry and demonstrative version of them, or it would either be... Guy Smiley, star of daytime television. Something that provokes engagement. Yes, it would be some flipping awful exaggeration of some aspect of them would show up. I can't remember why I went there as soon as she said you're not replaceable. That's very kind of you.

Well, I enjoyed that episode as well. And again, I was watching the USS Scalester last night and we were talking about how we would have watched the other one if we had more time as well.

I wanted to get you off the hook here because we could keep talking for a couple more hours, but I promised your people that I would not do that to you. So I wanted to say, like I said, I've been looking forward to this conversation for years. I'm delighted we got to do it. Oh, thank you. I hope to do it again. Thank you, sir. Yes.

That was a good one, right? Thanks again and again to Charlie Brooker. Thanks to Charlotte Silver, who produces and edits this show. Thanks to our advertisers and thanks to you. See you back next week with all new content.