Slow Horses director James Hawes has said that despite the now settled concerns raised by SAG-AFTRA during the strikes that persisted throughout last year, television shows made entirely by intelligent artificial intelligence are just three to five years away.
We’ve all seen the Black Mirror episode that teases an AI-generated television show based on our actions and mistakes in our lives – it’s haunting. Of course, this fictitious work comes from the hypothetical quandary of Charlie Brooker’s mind… but it does represent a startling look into the future.
Charlie Brooker once revealed that he had played around with the language model ChatGPT when he was writing the sixth season of Black Mirror. At first, he was terrified, resigned to being replaced by AI and confessed that his first instinct was to “jump out the f***ing window.”
But after seeing the model continue to generate ideas for an episode, Brooker admitted he was almost bored, painfully reading what ChatGPT thought an episode of Black Mirror should look like, rather than coming up with anything original.
Brooker inevitably decided against running with the AI-generated idea, but it does provide an insight into what many fear could be the direction we’ll all sleepwalking in.
As AI becomes a common lexicon for the modern audience, more and more AI-generated content is making its way onto our screens, with cutting-edge models such as Sora, Gemini and of course, ChatGPT, used by close to 200 million people every single day… and there are fears we could be looking at entire television shows made by AI in the near future.
“The best guess was three to five years,” Slow Horses director James Hawes revealed to the British Film & High-End TV Inquiry.
“Someone will say ‘Create a scene in an ER room where a doctor comes in and he’s having an affair with a woman and they’re flirting, and someone is dying on the table,’ and [AI] will start to create it. Maybe it won’t be as polished as we are used to but that is how close we are getting.”
The SAG-AFTRA strikes that endured for more than 100 days last year concluded with lengthy negotiations into AI-generated content. Entertainment workers, from actors and extras to crew behind the scenes, expressed their concerns about the use of AI for producing films and television, as studios entertained the notion of replicating an actor’s likeness, for use and reuse, for free, forever.
Now as AI models such as Sora, which can digitally create whole seconds of video from a singular – albeit detailed – prompt, the prospect of a real-life Black Mirror episode might be closer than we think.