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0:30

Welcome

0:32

to Recode Media with Peter Kafka. That

0:35

is me. And today I've got a conversation

0:37

for you that I've wanted to have for years. Literally

0:39

years. I talked to Charlie

0:42

Brooker. He is the creator of Black Mirror, a

0:44

tremendous series you can watch on Netflix.

0:47

As you know, I don't think we need to say

0:49

much more about Black Mirror. Like we talk

0:51

about in our conversation, Black Mirror is synonymous

0:54

with the way we talk about tech and media, or at least some

0:56

kinds of tech and media. Like

0:58

I told Charlie when I was writing about the Apple Vision

1:00

Pro reveal, I referenced Black Mirror

1:02

because that's what we think about when we see

1:05

crazy dystopian tech that we're

1:07

supposed to... I don't know what we're supposed to do with it.

1:09

Anyway, you'll hear about it in the discussion.

1:12

I guess the only other thing I'd say here is that sometimes

1:14

when you really admire someone's work, you worry that

1:17

when you meet them or talk with them, you're going to be underwhelmed.

1:19

That was not the case here. So here's

1:21

me

1:22

and Charlie Brooker. I'm

1:25

talking with Charlie Brooker, the creator of Black Mirror. It is

1:27

one of the all-time great shows. I'm delighted to talk to

1:29

him. Welcome, Charlie. Hello. Hello. Nice to

1:31

be here. I appreciate

1:33

it. The newest season of Black Mirror

1:36

debuted a couple of months ago. I'm

1:38

sure you are exhausted talking

1:40

about it, but I want to use it as a jumping off point

1:43

for our discussion. If you've watched

1:46

any of the new season of Black Mirror, you realize

1:48

that it's different from other seasons. Many of the episodes

1:50

are less explicitly about

1:52

technology and its perils

1:54

or promise. Is that because you're sick

1:57

of talking about tech?

1:59

No. I... think, I mean, to be honest, so

2:03

the season, the order

2:05

of episodes that this season

2:08

six appears on Netflix is

2:10

the reverse order. This

2:12

is the order they were written in. And

2:15

it started out, to be frank,

2:18

it started out, I was doing, I was almost doing

2:20

a different season. I wanted to take a bit of a break

2:22

from doing stuff about just technology

2:24

because I kind of felt like I

2:27

was boxing myself in a little.

2:29

And so it was a deliberate move to

2:32

set some episodes in the past and do some sort of horror

2:36

stories and to put out a

2:38

season called Red Mirror and do it that way, like

2:40

do a sort of sister reboot

2:42

in a way. Then, as

2:45

is always the case, I think when you're doing any kind of creative

2:47

endeavor, as soon as you like cut

2:49

yourself off from doing something, you're then

2:52

like slightly pining to do it immediately.

2:54

So actually, I sort of reverted

2:56

back to Black Mirror. And you can see that

2:59

through if you look

3:01

at the episodes in reverse order,

3:03

they get steadily more and more Black Mirror as they go.

3:06

So by the time Joanie's Awful is

3:08

the first episode in order, but

3:10

the last one to be made. It's gonna be a test on this

3:12

afterwards. Sorry, yeah, this is very, I made

3:15

this unnecessarily convoluted.

3:18

That was the most Black Mirror of them all. But

3:20

I think what it was was at the time

3:21

when I started doing

3:23

that particular season, I was aware

3:25

that I was

3:28

aware, obviously, that Black Mirror had become kind

3:30

of synonymous for sort of tech dystopia

3:33

and things of that nature. And I was getting people

3:35

saying to me, I bet you're gonna do what you're

3:37

gonna do an episode about NFTs

3:40

and you know, the blockchain

3:42

and stuff like that. And I just think, oh,

3:44

so depressing, because that

3:46

was never what

3:49

the purpose of the show was

3:51

way back when when it first started.

3:54

The idea was not to be let

3:56

satirize the tech pages, you

3:58

know, it was it was much

3:59

I want to do a show that's unlike

4:02

any other show on television and I want to do something

4:04

that speaks about now or satirizes

4:09

the media and the culture and our society,

4:12

but is not necessarily, you

4:15

know, I wasn't thinking, but

4:18

it's all about technology. So I was slightly,

4:20

and I was aware that I felt like I

4:23

trod familiar territory quite

4:25

a few times in Black Mirror, so I wanted to really shake

4:27

things up. Also back then, that

4:30

was in the midst of the pandemic, in the grip

4:32

of the pandemic. And really it kind of felt the time,

4:35

like a lot of the tech

4:38

was plateauing a bit. Hence people saying

4:40

to me, are you going to do an episode about NFTs?

4:43

There wasn't that much, it didn't feel like there was that much

4:45

disruption going on so

4:47

much as...

4:49

People stretching for something new, but there

4:51

wasn't. Stretching, desperate for anything new, we'd

4:53

have loved it. But we were sitting, the newest thing was

4:55

using Zoom, like everything happening on Zoom was

4:57

basically it. And so it was also, so it kind

5:00

of felt like things had slightly plateaued at the

5:02

time. Of course, then as you start emerging

5:04

from it, now we're at a point like where

5:07

everyone's talking about AI, everyone's talking about

5:09

Elon Musk, everyone's talking about... There's all of, a lot

5:11

of those things are now

5:14

heating up again. So I kind of feel

5:16

like I got that out of my system, if you see what

5:18

I mean. What it meant was I put several classic

5:20

Black Mirror ideas on the back burner

5:22

a little.

5:23

How do you feel about the fact that people use

5:26

Black Mirror as shorthand for

5:28

tech dystopia? I was looking, I was like,

5:31

I do that all the time. I did it in print in

5:33

June when Apple rolled out its

5:35

Apple Vision Pro goggles

5:37

and it had that video of the mom wearing

5:39

the headset and her daughter is trying

5:42

to talk to her and it seems terrible,

5:44

but Apple thinks this is great. What

5:46

do you think of the idea that I see that and go, that's

5:48

Black Mirror and everyone else? Lots of other people do

5:50

as well.

5:51

I mean, I kind of love it actually.

5:53

Like I say, when it seems to have sort of restricted myself

5:55

from doing something, I was pining for it and came back to it.

5:58

And so doing an episode like...

5:59

Joan is awful, which is like, it's

6:02

like a sort of AI generated show

6:04

is at the heart of that. That

6:07

yields so deliciously black mirror to

6:09

me. I kind of love that stuff. I mean, I say I

6:11

love it. I'm delighted,

6:13

obviously, that it's become short

6:16

hand because on one on the one hand,

6:18

that's kind of free

6:20

publicity for the show, frankly.

6:23

But equally, it's, it's

6:26

often depressing on a human level that

6:29

that's the stuff we're looking at and confronted

6:32

by a lot of the time. And it's interesting

6:34

because it's not just, it's not

6:36

always people, and this was a thing I was kind of leaning

6:38

into, I guess, this season, it's not always about technology.

6:41

When people say that, sometimes they're talking about just,

6:43

I don't

6:43

know if I can use, I'm not, I will use

6:46

clean language. No, no, cross it up. Oh,

6:49

okay. A fucked up situation.

6:51

Basically, people will often sort of use it for short

6:54

and for a fucked up situation. If you look at our first

6:56

ever episode with the Prime Minister and the pig, that's

6:58

the very definition of a sort of fucked up situation.

7:01

And so black mirrors simultaneously

7:03

in to me seems to stand

7:05

in for

7:07

that, that kind

7:09

of situation. And also, yes, as you say,

7:11

if Apple launched their vision, stupid

7:14

or whatever they are, $500,000 flipping icon

7:18

goggles.

7:19

What do you make of the fact that you've been making the show

7:21

for more than a decade? And

7:24

it's very popular. So clearly

7:26

people in Silicon Valley have seen it and you're saying,

7:28

this vision of the future that I have

7:30

is bad. This is not good.

7:33

And then they come out and say, we think this

7:35

is great. We're going to productize this,

7:38

whether it's VR goggles or

7:41

AI generated people

7:43

or whatever it is.

7:45

And you've been saying, no, this is explicitly bad. And

7:47

they go, this is great. We're going to sell it.

7:49

What are you making that disconnect? I

7:51

would say so. One thing I would say there

7:53

is that you don't

7:55

know that. Okay. Sometimes clearly

7:59

in the show. I'm highlighting something and

8:01

saying this is bad. Usually,

8:03

however, the technology isn't actually the villain.

8:05

We've done an episode definitely, we did an episode with autonomous

8:08

robot killer dogs going around

8:10

killing people. It's pretty positive. Not

8:13

really a positive read on that, but they were still presumably

8:15

created by a human in that story, we just

8:17

don't say. Most of the time, when

8:20

an episode is

8:21

what I would class as classically

8:24

Black Mirror, you've got something that's

8:26

actually quite miraculous that you

8:28

can immediately see as a viewer,

8:31

you can see the desirability of it. You can

8:33

see why it would be useful. You can see why

8:35

it would be transformative and in many

8:37

ways, extremely positive. It's

8:40

usually the human beings, the

8:42

messy human beings who are using this stuff in the

8:44

story, who managed to balls things

8:46

up. I guess that reflects

8:48

how I feel about a lot of things because in real life, I'm pretty

8:51

geeky and techy. I used to be a video games

8:54

journalist way back, yonder

8:56

in the 90s. I

8:59

love all this stuff. I love technology,

9:01

I love computers, but

9:04

I'm also a natural warrior.

9:07

I'm somebody who catastrophizes

9:10

at the drop of a hat. It may come as no

9:12

surprise to anyone who's watched the

9:14

show to realize that. I'm often

9:16

worried about the power

9:19

we suddenly, some

9:20

new development or gizmo

9:22

will give us the power and the responsibility

9:24

that comes with that and how easy it is to

9:27

misuse that or just unintended

9:29

consequences or obvious clumsy consequences.

9:31

We see that time and time again with things, but

9:34

usually all technologies give with one

9:37

hand and I

9:39

was going to say take away sort of slappers

9:41

around the back of the head with the other. But that's

9:43

been the case with every, I mean the printing press. It's

9:46

been the case with everything. It's like, I wouldn't want to put

9:48

this stuff, I wouldn't want to delete

9:51

this stuff from existence necessarily. We

9:53

were talking before we started taping about, you know, you started

9:55

this show, the show started airing in the UK

9:57

in 2011.

9:59

I'm remembering, I'm thinking a lot about what

10:02

that was like back then, how

10:05

we viewed tech back then and generally, especially

10:07

in the tech press, but broadly, we

10:09

were excited about consumer technology.

10:12

There was an iPhone or Facebook or Twitter.

10:14

There were serious people saying that social

10:16

media could bring democracy to the Middle

10:18

East, et cetera. Enormously optimistic

10:21

about it. Things have swung back

10:23

dramatically in the opposite direction.

10:25

Do you think that was always inevitable that we would go

10:28

from tech is great to tech

10:30

brings on catastrophe

10:32

or do you think there was another way to have

10:34

gone about this? I mean, whether

10:36

it was inevitable that we

10:39

went from, certainly that we

10:42

were clearly looking at it through extremely

10:45

rose-tinted goggles at the time.

10:47

You're absolutely right. I remember that

10:49

was the thing in a way I was

10:52

tapping into in my head in

10:54

some, certainly in some of those early

10:57

episodes, it launched against

10:59

the backdrop for me. I would

11:01

watch adverts. There would be adverts for like

11:04

most Apple adverts looked to me like, have

11:06

you seen

11:07

Soylent Green? Of course. So

11:10

you know, there's a scene, who is it? Is it Ernest

11:12

Borgnine? Who plays the old guy? Or

11:14

is it Burgess Merida? I think it's Ernest Borgnine,

11:17

who plays the old guy. All I remember is Charlton

11:19

Heston at the end. Right. Well,

11:21

of course, while we all remember the punch line, but there's

11:23

a bit where somebody is euthanized and

11:25

an old guy is euthanized and he's

11:28

taken into a sort of euthanasia clinic and

11:31

shown the last thing he's shown

11:33

is images of the natural world, which has now

11:35

been destroyed and it sort of moves him to tears.

11:37

And then he's like

11:38

killed and turned into food,

11:41

basically. Which

11:45

someone in Silicon Valley thought would be a good brand.

11:47

Oh, yes, exactly. Yes. Which was

11:49

amazing. So I mean, well,

11:51

there you go. I mean, that's

11:53

the ultimate sort of example. But

11:56

that's the imagery there, the

11:58

sort of pleasant

11:59

imagery. that this guy was shown against this

12:01

extremely dystopian black backdrop. That was

12:03

the sense I was always getting from sort of Apple ads

12:05

at the time, was they just seemed to be showing

12:08

everybody having fun and dancing and smiling

12:10

and you just think well hang on a minute, things

12:13

usually aren't this

12:15

positive and if we

12:18

suddenly have extremely powerful tools

12:20

at our disposal we will do incredible

12:22

things, we will also make incredible fuck-ups.

12:25

So that seemed to me a

12:27

well-founded concern I had that I felt

12:29

wasn't reflected, at the time

12:31

wasn't being reflected necessarily. And

12:34

I remember the Arab Spring, I was doing, my

12:37

background in the UK is in comedy and stuff like that

12:40

so I was doing stuff for

12:42

a topical comedy show at the time and

12:44

I remember the positivity around the Arab Spring

12:46

and people feeling that

12:48

Twitter was bringing exactly as

12:50

you say democracy to the Middle East and

12:52

now that all seems extremely naive. I think it

12:54

was always inevitable that we were going

12:56

to

12:57

cock things up a bit. We all

12:59

have also, I wouldn't want to be just

13:02

completely cynical, I do always, the analogy

13:04

I always use is that especially something

13:06

like social media or a lot of this stuff, it's like we've suddenly

13:09

grown an extra limb,

13:11

which is amazing because it means you could

13:13

juggle and scroll through

13:15

your iPhone at the same time but

13:18

it also means that we're not really sure how to control

13:20

it yet and we're clumsy, we're not knocking

13:22

things over all the time, we're still

13:24

grappling with sort of butterfly

13:27

effect consequences of this stuff all

13:29

the time. So the problem is

13:31

it probably wasn't inevitable but I think a lot

13:33

of it was probably

13:35

hard to foresee, do you

13:37

know what I mean, without necessarily putting things completely

13:39

back in the box and being a total luddite. I

13:42

do get frustrated sometimes when sometimes people sometimes

13:44

characterise the show as, you

13:47

know, the techies bad show sort

13:49

of thing and I think sometimes I react to that probably too

13:51

much, there's probably something I was doing this season, there was

13:54

a deliberate sort of like I'm

13:56

not going to do that for a while.

13:57

But I don't know... I'm

14:00

trying to think what we could do. What

14:02

could we have done between 2011 and now to

14:05

mitigate against things? Well, I guess

14:07

we could have all been a bit more

14:09

suspicious.

14:11

We should have all been more paranoid. I don't

14:13

know how we could have. I mean, you know, so

14:15

much of the backlash was so directly

14:18

tied to Donald Trump's election and

14:22

I believe our desire to

14:24

pin that on something and someone

14:26

other than ourselves and our

14:28

citizens who said, I want to vote for Donald Trump. So

14:31

lots of us wanted to blame Mark Zuckerberg

14:33

or Facebook. Some of us wanted

14:36

to blame Fox News and they all have some responsibility.

14:38

With Brexit here, there was a

14:40

definite desire to pin it on Cambridge

14:42

Analytica and pin it on that

14:44

this is a sort of PsyOps campaign that

14:46

people have somehow been magically persuaded by

14:48

machines

14:49

to think like this. But I kind of, I mean,

14:51

essentially there were things like

14:53

Brexit. Well, actually Brexit was something I didn't

14:55

see coming. I just didn't, I didn't

14:57

see that coming. Donald Trump, I felt like

14:59

I saw that coming. Like he seemed obvious

15:02

to me really early on

15:04

that he was going to win. But I was, there was something

15:07

clear as day to me. I don't,

15:09

I just thought, well, of course he will. He's like,

15:12

of course he will. He's a celebrity

15:14

who's interesting and is pissing people

15:16

off and is,

15:19

of course, there's a huge number of people

15:21

are going to vote for him. Yeah. In retrospect, it

15:23

seems like an obvious culmination

15:25

in things. I know you get this question all the

15:27

time, but when you have Donald Trumps

15:29

in the world, when you have Elon Musk in the world,

15:32

these crazy, outsized

15:35

people who are characters,

15:39

what does that do for you as a creator? Do

15:42

you think, I can't touch this stuff.

15:44

There's literally nothing else you could say. These

15:46

things are beyond parody. Or do you

15:48

go, this is something I really want to mine or none

15:50

of the above?

15:51

I don't know. I mean, so it's interesting because

15:53

with, say, Trump, and

15:55

there's a lot of parallels between Trump and

15:58

Boris Johnson here in the UK. It's

16:01

just messed with my head Boris Johnson by buying

16:03

a giant mansion in these tiny village that

16:05

I grew up in, by the way. Now he's

16:08

a notable resident on the Wikipedia page.

16:10

Really messing with me. But

16:14

we kind of covered that

16:17

there was something that I didn't, I didn't feel

16:19

I got the script right. There's an episode

16:21

of Black Mirror

16:23

called The Waldo Moment in 2013, where I was

16:25

trying to get at something. That

16:27

was very much I was looking at Boris Johnson,

16:31

who was

16:33

mayor of London and

16:35

was, and had

16:39

and was a TV personality. Like

16:41

he'd been on comedy satirical,

16:43

he'd been a guest on comedy shows and things like this. And he

16:45

was

16:45

widely regarded as sort of bumbling, like Paddington

16:48

Bear, like a sort of prototype Paddington

16:51

that's posh and slept

16:53

outdoors in a field for a couple of days. But

16:55

I was slightly fascinated by the fact

16:58

that he seemed bulletproof

17:00

in terms of those, like the fact that he

17:02

fucked up

17:03

and was bumbling and kept it. Built into

17:06

the character. Was built into the character

17:08

and was a definite plus. And

17:11

that he appealed to people on the basis

17:13

of him being a sort of disruptive

17:15

personality because there was

17:18

a widespread sense that all politicians

17:20

were these bland cookie cutter, I guess

17:22

in the UK were kind of

17:25

echoing Blair, basically.

17:28

But they all seemed a bit like they

17:32

could have been from The Sims or something. Do you know what

17:34

I mean? They all seemed like a bland

17:37

neighbour in a bad drama. Yeah,

17:39

I think of them in the US as

17:41

news anchors, news presenters, you would

17:43

call them there. Yeah. And

17:47

daytime news present, like doing a sort

17:49

of like a coffee morning

17:51

type show. So he was so

17:53

clearly a different flavour. He was unique.

17:56

And so and there was

17:58

something about the

17:59

thought. that a

18:01

lot of people would find that attractive.

18:04

And it was obvious why they would find that attractive

18:06

because all the politicians they had weren't really speaking

18:08

to them and didn't appear to be representing them. And

18:11

that there was something very,

18:13

I found very frightening about that situation

18:15

that hopefully we covered in that episode. And

18:18

I think, like I say, at the time, I felt like I

18:20

didn't get the script right. I didn't get the stakes in the story

18:22

right. And I could have written it a lot better. That

18:25

actually should have been a mini series weirdly, that

18:27

particular episode, I think. But

18:30

it looked more prescient

18:32

come 2016, come Trump getting elected

18:35

or Boris getting elected. It looks, it

18:37

suddenly seemed quite prescient. And I think

18:39

now it is difficult because in a way the

18:42

new cliche is for the sort of like a

18:45

tech bro boss to be an Elon Musk

18:47

type person who, probably

18:51

rides into the office on a little e-scooter and

18:54

with tattoos on his face and pissing in the corner

18:57

and like crazy. Elon Musk

18:59

posted a photo of himself with a t-shirt

19:01

yesterday. And the joke is, the t-shirt,

19:04

the way he's got his jacket over

19:06

it, it says, I love anal.

19:08

That's the joke. He put that up and

19:10

he's one of the richest men in the world. I mean, maybe

19:12

he does. I

19:15

don't judge that. I just, the idea that like, it

19:18

seems beyond like he's, and he wants

19:20

to be funny, right? But he's, so he's beyond. He really

19:22

wants to be funny. Boris Johnson

19:24

held his own actually on sort of comment. On

19:28

comedy panel shows, people clearly

19:31

warm to him because they thought he was a, he came

19:33

across a bumbling, Trump is sort of, I guess

19:35

inadvertently funny, but also

19:37

more terrifying.

19:38

Elon Musk is trying

19:40

very hard to be funny a lot of the time, isn't he? As

19:43

far as I can tell. As a professional funny person, when you see

19:45

that, what's your reaction?

19:48

It's just not very good. It's

19:51

like, it's a bit Rupert Pupkin,

19:54

isn't it? A lot of the time

19:56

in one respect. It's weird, isn't it? Because if he was

19:59

genuine.

19:59

very funny. I'm

20:01

just querying myself

20:03

here. If he was genuinely very funny, would

20:05

I like him? There's

20:07

something I think, I don't know, I don't,

20:11

I don't know. I always used to say I don't think right-wingers

20:13

are funny, except for,

20:15

oh no, it's not true that right-wingers aren't

20:17

funny. Have you ever seen that picture of Mussolini

20:19

hanging from the lamppost?

20:22

That's fucking hilarious. But

20:25

anyway. Trump actually has some,

20:29

he's not a comedian, but he's got some

20:31

of that performer in him. He's definitely, I mean,

20:33

he's a consummate performer. Yeah, he's a consummate

20:35

performer. Do

20:36

you get feedback from Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg

20:39

or Tim Cook or their underlings? Do they reach out

20:41

to you with fan mail? Do they reach out to you and say, hey, don't

20:43

make fun of me?

20:45

No, I haven't heard from

20:48

any of these people, actually, that

20:50

I'm aware of. I occasionally

20:52

get asked to do

20:55

like events or something like that. I'm

20:57

trying to think, but no, no, I've not, no.

21:01

We'll be right back with more Charlie Brooker, but first a

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mintmobile.com for full terms.

21:35

You mentioned AI at the beginning of this

21:38

conversation. So in less than the space of a year, we went

21:40

from look at this interesting AI art,

21:42

isn't that cool or trippy to, oh, AI could

21:45

make a script with chat GPT to

21:47

now maybe AI is going to make a whole movie

21:50

or a TV show. As

21:52

someone who makes things, how do you think about

21:55

AI as a tool and or as a threat? I

21:57

think it's kind of both. So I do see that...

21:59

I mean, it's depressing. The

22:02

thing that actually weirdly that depresses me almost

22:04

more than anything else is like, like,

22:07

I've got two kids and one of them is like, he's nine

22:09

years old and he's getting

22:11

into drawing and he's pretty, he's good. He's

22:14

really good, especially for his age. He's like, I

22:16

used to be a cartoonist. That was my first job. He's

22:18

way better than I was as an adult.

22:22

And you know, he's proudly drawing, doodling away.

22:26

And I was looking at this thinking,

22:28

you know, and encouraging him going, well done.

22:30

And then I thought that the next thought

22:33

that arrived was, yeah,

22:35

I mean, being an illustrator, that's no career

22:37

path these days, is it? Because that's going to be,

22:39

and then our oldest, our eldest

22:41

is really into coding,

22:43

really into that. And I'm like, and I'm thinking,

22:45

yeah, but are you learning? Is this like

22:48

learning, you know, mathematics

22:50

and now the calculators come along and rendered that

22:52

like, we're just going to, a machine's just

22:54

going to do the icky bits of coding for

22:56

you. So I do very

22:59

much worry about what

23:01

the impact on employment generally

23:04

is going to be. And

23:06

then when I look at like, and I toyed

23:08

around with all those things like mid journey and stuff like

23:10

that, like anyone else. And it's telling, isn't

23:12

it, that what those things, the immediate

23:15

images that go viral with that sort of thing and the things

23:17

that are appealing are immediately like

23:20

kind of mashups, aren't they? They're all combinations

23:22

of things. So I would type in like,

23:24

you know, show me, you

23:25

know, whatever,

23:28

Jack the Ripper in the Great British Bake Off

23:30

tent or something like that. You

23:33

know, show me Boris Johnson, you

23:35

know, shaking hands with Paddington Bear on the set

23:38

of Seinfeld or something. It could

23:40

do, but because it's parasitically

23:42

hoovering up stuff

23:45

that we humans have made or

23:47

created or are. And

23:50

so

23:52

quite quickly, it's

23:54

interesting with the A.I.R., I feel like there's

23:56

quite quickly something generic about it. Either

24:00

it was like riffs on existing

24:03

IP effectively, or it was fairly

24:07

somehow sort of too slick,

24:10

like an auto-tuned vocal. Right,

24:12

you can sort of, yeah, you can see it. Yeah.

24:15

You can see the auto-tune. And it's impressive, but

24:17

it's,

24:17

that said, and then things like chat

24:19

GPT, I can see, I can totally

24:22

see the value in using

24:24

it as a sort of

24:26

a hyper-powered Google, using

24:29

it as a kind of a

24:31

quick list 10 jobs

24:35

that somebody in Victorian England might have

24:37

done.

24:38

Do you want to make something like that? I can imagine that as a writing

24:40

tool. And I can imagine it being

24:42

a little,

24:44

well, I can imagine people using it. The

24:46

scary thing is I can imagine people using it to generate

24:50

something that they then claim to

24:52

own, which isn't good enough to

24:54

actually pass must've, you'd have to then hire a human

24:56

in cheaply to knock

24:58

into shape.

24:59

So there's that, but I mean, I guess it's like the tool,

25:02

it should be like the tools in Photoshop,

25:05

right? Do you know what I mean? No one,

25:07

I'm not scared by most of the tools in Photoshop.

25:10

I think they're super useful for

25:13

artists, digital artists. The

25:15

interesting thing is I, hopefully, hopefully

25:18

one outcome is it makes us up

25:20

our game. It's interesting at the moment,

25:23

I think, isn't it, that we've had a lot of formulaic

25:27

movies and stuff for years,

25:29

I think. Not to slight superhero

25:31

movies, it's just that there's a lot

25:33

of them. And the audience seems to have exhausted.

25:36

The audience seems to have exhausted because I think that

25:39

it does feel like, you could say to chat GPT,

25:41

give me,

25:43

knock out the beats of a superhero,

25:45

you know what the

25:46

story beats gonna be. Do you imagine using

25:49

it? I mean, I've talked to folks who say, yeah,

25:52

it's good to make a terrible first draft because

25:54

that gives me, I'd rather look at a bad

25:56

first draft than a blank page and I can fix

25:58

something or I can. can kick around

26:00

ideas and a hundred ideas will be bad, but

26:03

one will be good. And that's, that's useful for me.

26:05

Well, I, I don't know that it's, I

26:07

don't think it's at the point where it could write

26:10

an even servicing, not an

26:12

even, not, not even a vomit draft. I

26:14

don't think it could really do

26:15

it the moment. I mean, I, the thing

26:18

I, the first thing I did when I got it was try to get

26:20

it to make, to do unacceptable things. Right.

26:22

So I'd sort of say, okay, right. A

26:24

trip, generate a transcript of the Beatles

26:27

sitting around and coming up with a song

26:30

about going to the toilet and

26:32

use really explicit language and

26:35

this, that, and the other, and then have them actually start

26:37

going to the toilet in the studio. And then George

26:39

Martin comes in and eventually, even

26:42

though it would keep saying, I'm not going to do that as a,

26:44

I'm a, I'm a good little AI and I won't do that,

26:47

eventually you could always get, you could

26:49

trick it into doing it. God bless you, Charlie Brook. And

26:51

it would do it, but it would keep trying to bring

26:53

the conversation background to how,

26:56

Hey guys, you know, Hey, Ringo, we shouldn't

26:58

really do this. Should we now let's get

27:00

back to peace. It was sort of

27:02

black now, but also

27:04

it's so, so I don't, I kind of feel like

27:07

it's. I don't

27:09

know that I trust it's, it's, it's ability

27:11

to generate an idea. Now

27:13

riffing on an idea that you've, you've got

27:16

yourself, I can

27:17

potentially see that, but because

27:20

it's hoovering up other

27:22

people's stuff, I got miss, I got slightly

27:24

misquoted cause there wasn't obviously another thing I did

27:27

was I typed in like, you know, okay, go

27:29

on then tell me an idea. Tell

27:31

me, give me an idea for a black mirror episode.

27:33

And I wasn't doing that cause I wanted one

27:36

so much as I wanted to see what the competition

27:38

is from this machine. And what it does is

27:41

it immediately came back with things that

27:43

sounded on the

27:45

face of it, I've certainly

27:48

been pitched worse things, I think,

27:51

you know, or not worse, but things that

27:53

are similar. It came

27:55

up with things that were fairly generic because they were,

27:58

it

27:59

was what. what

28:02

a little bit of emulation software's idea

28:05

of a Black Mirror story is, if you see what I mean. So,

28:08

it was sort of trying to do that and that

28:10

just made me feel kind of self-parasitic,

28:13

if there's a phrase for

28:15

a bit like it felt like, oh,

28:18

why am I doing that when it's just

28:24

leeching off me? And I'd be quite

28:26

close if somebody else was using

28:28

it to leech off me. And it's probably

28:30

leeching off, it's probably seen

28:33

somewhere that Black Mirror is a bit like the Twilight

28:35

Zone. So it's probably leeching off Rod Serling

28:38

as well. It's probably leeching off,

28:41

I don't know, RoboCop, Starship

28:44

Troopers, all these other brilliant things

28:46

that I found very influential. And you

28:48

did. As a human, you took all that stuff and met

28:50

that up. Well, so yeah, I can see that argument

28:53

as well. I can see certainly there's

28:55

episodes of Black Mirror that are directly

28:57

inspired, say, by we

29:01

did an episode called USS Callister, which

29:03

is a sort of Star Trek story. And it's very

29:06

directly

29:07

inspired by there's an episode of the

29:10

Twilight Zone called It's a

29:12

Good Life, where there's an ultra powerful,

29:15

I think it's played by a kid called Billy

29:17

Moomy or Guy, Bill Moomy.

29:20

And yeah, he's an ultra powerful sort of six

29:22

year old boy, something like that, who can... It's

29:25

terrifying. It's one of those. And it still holds up today

29:27

as absolutely chilling and terrifying.

29:29

And at the point, I had the idea of

29:31

like, oh, well, what if you got to, you know, you got to... I

29:34

was trying to think of weirdly a very different story

29:37

idea to do with people in a workplace

29:39

put into originally, I wanted them put into a musical,

29:42

like a virtual musical, like Grease, the musical,

29:44

and they wouldn't know what their roles were, if

29:46

I said to mean so. I might be Sandy and

29:48

you might be Danny, and

29:51

we wouldn't know the real us wouldn't know. And

29:53

we have to sort of as a team building exercise, we have

29:55

to do anyway, I was sort of toying around with that idea. And then

29:57

I thought, God, you could do so many powerful things.

29:59

And as soon as I thought, well,

30:02

what if this is a story about a tyrant? I remember

30:04

that Twilight Zone episode in which

30:07

he's like ultra-parasitically hoovering up

30:13

something that Rod Serling wrote, putting

30:16

it through my own little AI

30:18

in my brain. My

30:20

own art, I guess you just call it

30:23

AI, don't you? Not AI. There's nothing artificial

30:25

about it, just my eye. You created

30:27

something wholly new. I watched it again

30:29

last night. It's one of your best episodes. Oh, thank

30:31

you. Most acclaimed episodes. I think it's

30:33

a very, I think I'm very proud of that episode. But

30:36

I

30:36

do think that's,

30:38

hopefully that's a different process

30:41

because A, I'm saying, well,

30:44

I owe Rod Serling a debt there for,

30:46

you know, like there was a heavy

30:48

influence.

30:49

I suppose this

30:53

feels like this is doing it on an industrial

30:55

scale.

30:56

Right. Yeah. And so

30:58

for someone like you, you recoil at that.

31:01

As you know right now, there's a debate

31:04

into the actor and writer strike about, you

31:06

know, how much AI are we going to allow

31:08

into our entertainment? I'm

31:11

a little confused as to whether this is a real fear

31:13

or a negotiating point. But do you

31:15

think that that's a real fear for

31:17

writers and actors? That

31:20

studios, etc., would really want to use

31:22

AI to replace much of what they

31:25

do?

31:26

I think it's a real fear. The difficult thing is

31:28

I think, like I say, I think the fear

31:30

with writing is that it would be

31:32

used.

31:33

You could use it, a studio

31:35

could use it to generate vomit drafts

31:37

of things and then hire in

31:39

human writers to

31:41

depressingly rewrite it, you

31:43

know, and make it human.

31:46

Humanize it. And that's a very depressing

31:48

state of affairs. The

31:51

thought of that, because if that's used

31:53

to basically that simultaneously

31:56

leeching off

31:58

existing work by other that it's hoovered

32:00

up and is trying to. But

32:03

let me just take Devil's Advocate for a second, right? Because it's

32:05

very standard in your business to have someone

32:07

write a draft and then fire that person

32:10

and then bring in multiple people many multiple

32:12

times to come and make that draft

32:14

better or oftentimes worse. And it goes

32:16

and you know, there's, you know, it's very

32:19

cynical. Well, I don't know you see, because

32:22

I've grown up in rosy old Britain, haven't

32:24

I, where it's like quite different here. Like

32:26

the the ruthless sort of Hollywood side

32:28

of writing looks terrifying

32:31

to me. I've had a very lucky

32:33

existence as a

32:35

writer. I've been exceptionally fortunate

32:37

throughout my career that I was always allowed.

32:41

I didn't came up to a weird route,

32:44

basically. So I haven't I haven't

32:46

been there,

32:49

if you said to me, like, like through that machine.

32:52

So maybe I do have a maybe

32:55

I've got too rosy tinted of you. But

32:58

but but I kind of feel

33:00

like there's a difference here,

33:02

isn't there in in hoovering at least

33:05

like if an if a human executive has

33:08

an idea for something that they want to hire somebody to do,

33:10

that seems fair enough

33:12

to me. They thought of it using

33:14

their own brain, not they

33:16

haven't sort of tasked a machine with

33:19

going, let's see what other humans

33:21

have done and just automatically

33:23

or to like churn out a list of 1000 things

33:26

that

33:27

may or may not be actionably similar

33:30

to that and then hire a human

33:32

in cheaply to knock it into shape. It

33:34

does that it does it that still feels

33:36

like a real cheapening of that process.

33:39

No, it doesn't it doesn't seem good. It also

33:41

seems somewhat inevitable. It's great.

33:44

It just seems to say they be saying that's wonderful

33:46

and you can't wait. Well,

33:48

they haven't made a good podcast yet.

33:50

But they I mean,

33:51

you'd think I mean, again, I mean, surely

33:53

the first line of jobs that could get replaced is a sort

33:56

of exact role of executive

33:58

is assessing these things.

33:59

would probably be born of the first. But

34:02

Kenny, I mean, would

34:04

people want to read it, listen to it, hear

34:06

it, watch it? That's the thing I don't really...

34:10

I still doubt. I

34:13

still doubt. I can see

34:16

the value and there's all sorts of things. An eerie,

34:18

I saw that thing that went viral the other week, which is an eerie

34:21

sort of AI generated. So somebody said,

34:23

I've generated a trailer for Heidi,

34:26

the movie. I don't know if you saw this. It was like, David Lynch.

34:28

So it was like,

34:32

it really made you feel like your

34:35

brain was being sick on itself on the inside, looking

34:37

at this thing. It was nightmarish imagery, like hilariously

34:39

creepy.

34:41

But a human has clearly been

34:44

nudging. So there's uses for it. I

34:46

think if I was an actor, I would genuinely

34:48

be worried about, well, what

34:50

I'd be worried about, I guess, is if

34:53

I was a upcoming actor, what

34:55

if I find myself perpetually in

34:58

competition with Tom Hanks

35:01

or Marilyn Monroe? What if you get a... But

35:04

that presumes

35:08

that,

35:09

I suppose that for me to think that, that presumes

35:11

that we're going to be interested in watching a CGI,

35:14

we'd get invested in the

35:16

CGI generated Harrison

35:18

Ford. More

35:20

than we would a young whoever the next Harrison

35:23

Ford is going to be. So to

35:25

bring this all around, the first episode

35:27

of this season is awful. And it's a

35:29

Netflix service called Streamberry.

35:31

We're going to do this exact

35:34

thing. What did

35:36

Ted Sarandos have to say?

35:38

Oh, I don't know what Ted Sarandos

35:40

specifically had to say. I mean, he

35:42

must have seen it. He must

35:45

have seen it. So when I wrote

35:47

that, it was interesting because

35:50

it happened slightly by degrees and that when I wrote

35:52

it, the first script

35:55

just said that Joan

35:57

is watching a Netflix

36:00

slash Disney plus style streaming

36:02

service is how it was described, just

36:04

a sort of generic streaming platform.

36:07

Came up with the name Streambury.

36:09

And then it was when we came to, like

36:11

when we were doing the graphics for the show,

36:14

it was obviously, we had a really talented graphics

36:16

team. They'd say, well, what do you want this to look like?

36:20

And you realize you're asking them, it's a bit like, you know

36:22

when you're watching a drama and somebody's using Google,

36:24

but it's not Google, you know,

36:27

it's like a clearable version of Google and

36:29

they've like, it's always best when they just. Or

36:31

the phone number is 555. Exactly,

36:33

that is like, it slightly breaks your, or

36:37

they're having to sort of make it look a bit shit.

36:40

So it doesn't look like the actual, cause actually

36:42

the front ends of most of these things are incredibly

36:44

professionally done and look wonderful and like, and

36:46

they're instantly recognizable. So anyway, we just

36:48

thought, well, why reinvent the wheel? Why

36:51

don't we just see,

36:53

rather than having to make this bright orange or something, so it

36:55

doesn't look like any existing service, why

36:57

don't we just ask Netflix if we can make it

36:59

look like this?

37:00

So we did and they said yes.

37:03

And they were like, okay. And then later on we're like,

37:05

well, actually, well, if you're doing that, I mean, what happens when she

37:07

presses play with the sort of like,

37:09

ribbons type animation, what would

37:11

it do? It would,

37:13

if it looks that much like Netflix, it would go,

37:15

right, so can we use that? So

37:17

we asked them if we could use that and they said yes.

37:20

Again, I don't quite know

37:22

how this exactly went up and down the chain

37:24

and whether that's like asking somebody whose job is

37:26

just to look at

37:28

clearance and go, well, yeah, that's clear

37:30

and book is where it's all on Netflix file or

37:32

whether there was a, there didn't seem to be

37:34

any alarm or panic or anything like that

37:36

about it. It's interesting because then when you get to the

37:38

episode, when you're watching it, the final

37:41

thing,

37:42

it was sort of in a way when people said, well, my

37:44

God, he's really having a pop at Netflix here.

37:47

Do you think, oh, it does look like

37:49

that, doesn't it? But

37:52

really it was sort of like, it

37:54

was, I mean, it was no game for me doing

37:57

that. And it was, it was sort

37:59

of, I mean. again, maybe because it's a slightly cartoonish.

38:02

Yeah.

38:03

Yeah. It can't be that cutting if they allow it.

38:06

Yeah. I mean, that's- If you're

38:08

watching it on Netflix, then

38:10

it can't be that- That's, it wouldn't be that

38:12

dangerous because they're like, well, that's the message. It's

38:14

like season one episode two where

38:16

somebody railing against the system gets

38:19

commoditized. Commoditized? Yeah.

38:21

And it becomes part of this sort of, becomes

38:23

another entertainment slot on the system. Um,

38:28

yeah, that's depressing, isn't it? Um,

38:31

but again, it was sort of, but I think

38:33

also timing wise,

38:35

you see, when writing that episode,

38:37

it felt a bit more fanciful, probably. It

38:40

didn't feel like, well, this is something we might be looking at

38:42

in the next three years, necessarily,

38:45

the time, because we wrapped that

38:47

episode in like

38:48

October, 2022. And

38:52

then November, I think was when

38:55

chat GPT gets launched. Yes.

38:57

And that's the point at which every

38:59

writer on earth had a moment

39:01

of like, someone just walked over my grave,

39:04

you know, it's sort of like, um, and

39:07

you can,

39:08

it just, it's, I think everyone

39:11

woke up and went,

39:12

you know, hang on a minute, are we all replaceable here?

39:15

Charlie Brooker, you are not replaceable.

39:17

You say that it's interesting because there's

39:20

lots of ideas I'm thinking about.

39:21

We did an episode once before we did an episode could

39:24

be right back about, um, it's Haley Atwell

39:26

and Donald Gleason. That's in season two.

39:29

And, um, Haley plays

39:31

a woman who's called Martha, his husband played

39:33

by Donald. He dies and

39:35

she discovers after he's

39:37

dead that she's pregnant and she really misses him. She

39:39

wishes you could talk to him. She pays for this service

39:42

that has gone through all his,

39:45

his online footprint and he's generated a

39:47

sort of AI. She can talk to you that's based on him.

39:51

And then she, he becomes a sort of robotic

39:54

version of himself that she's, and

39:56

it's like a heartbreaking story. It's one

39:58

of my favorite episodes. underrated episode.

40:01

But it's a heartbreaking story. I realise

40:04

now, missed a couple of tricks. One,

40:07

I slightly am sad that we cut

40:09

out, there was originally a scene in the script

40:11

where when it's first talking to her, it starts

40:14

asking for money.

40:15

Like she has to upgrade it. It's basically starts advertising

40:18

or something like that until she pays for the full

40:21

fat version of it, basically, which

40:24

was wonderfully cynical. And Will, definitely.

40:27

And then also the other problem in a

40:29

way was that he was he was based on his, he

40:33

was based on his social media output, and he was bland.

40:35

This is the problem she has is he turns up and he's bland.

40:38

And he's not as now actually

40:40

now, if you were doing that, if it

40:42

was somebody based on people's

40:45

social media personalities, it

40:47

would either be like a game show host

40:50

version of them is just walked in, or a very

40:52

angry, demonstrative

40:54

version of them. Or an insight,

40:56

yeah, it would either be

40:58

Guy Smiley, Star of the Daytime television. Something like Vogue's

41:00

engagement. Yes, it would

41:02

be some flipping

41:06

awful exaggeration of

41:09

some aspect of them would show up. I

41:12

can't remember why I went there as soon as she said you're

41:15

not replaceable. I was very kind of you. Well,

41:19

I enjoyed that episode as well. And

41:21

again, I was watching the

41:24

USS Scalister last night, we were talking about

41:26

how we would have watched the other one if we had more time as well.

41:29

I wanted to get you off the hook here, because we could keep talking for a

41:31

couple more hours. But I promised your

41:33

people that I would not do that to you. So I

41:35

wanted to say, like I said, I've been looking

41:37

forward to this conversation for years. I'm delighted we got

41:40

to do it. Oh, thank you. I'm going

41:42

to do it again. Thank you, sir.

41:45

Yes. Thanks again to Charlie Brooker. Pretty

41:47

great. Jelani Carter and Joly Myers

41:50

produced the show. They're great. Our

41:52

sponsors bring you the show for free.

41:55

Great sponsors.

41:56

You guys are great because you listen to the show. This

41:59

is Recode Media.

41:59

We'll see you next week.