For HBO and Max, ChatGPT is not the way of the future.
CEO and President Casey Bloys addressed the AI debate in the writers room during a FYC Variety TV Event. The rise of artificial intelligence is one of the theses of the ongoing WGA strike.
“Two things to keep in mind when I say this: One is, remember I grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which is Steel Town. So I’m very, very aware of what happens when a company doesn’t think ahead or isn’t future aware,” Bloys said. or not. We just don’t use all the stuff that other places do, it just isn’t something we do. So my take on AI, the idea that AI would be involved in any kind of development or creative process in the kinds of shows I do, or do, at HBO, that’s not something I want to be a part of.
He added, “If it becomes something — and I hope I don’t sound like a steely executive in the ’70s — I just can’t see it. And if he is, I hope to God I’m retired by then.
‘Black Mirror’ creator Charlie Brooker recently shared that he attempted to enlist ChatGPT to write an episode of the hit Netflix series. However, the final product turned out to be “shit”.
“I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT a bit,” Brooker said. “The first thing I did was type ‘generate ‘Black Mirror’ episode” and something comes up that, at first glance, seems plausible, but at second glance it’s crap.
Brooker continued, “Because all that’s been done is look up all the ‘Black Mirror’ episode synopses and put them together. So if you dig a little deeper, you go, ‘Oh, there’s actually no real original thinking here.’”
Yet the computer-generated program warned Brooker of redundancies in its own writing.
“I was aware that I’ve written a lot of episodes where someone says, ‘Oh, I’ve been inside a computer the whole time!’” he concluded. “So I thought, ‘I’m just throwing out any sense of what I think is an episode of ‘Black Mirror.’ There’s no point in having an anthology show if you can’t break your own rules.
