Charlie Brooker on anxiety, AI and Black Mirror: ‘We're just so exhausted from the news’
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Charlie Brooker, creator and writer of TV hit Black Mirror tells The News Agents about how he turned his own worries about the world into the hugely popular TV show, why he’s worried about the rise of AI and the blurring of entertainment and how we live our lives.
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In brief…
- Charlie Brooker says the themes of Black Mirror, such as human reliance on technology, stem from his own worries about the world we live in.
- He describes AI as his greatest concern, and while he describes it as a tool with great potential, says he is worried about a day when computers can write better television than he can.
- But he says no AI system will ever be able to replicate the human-to-human storytelling of his writing, and all creative processes.
Charlie Brooker is an anxious man, and has made a career making other people anxious too.
Since 2011, his TV series Black Mirror has thrilled and scared viewers with its dystopian depiction of modern life and our relationship with technology, blurring the lines between science-fiction and the ever-changing world we see around us.
And with its seventh season having recently dropped on Netflix, Brooker is bringing his anxieties to 2025 TV viewers once again.
“I’m a natural worrier, so Black Mirror was partly born of my general anxieties about where we were in 2011, and at the time, technology was being portrayed in a very positive light,” he tells Emily Maitlis and Lewis Goodall, on The News Agents.
“Worries can hit me at pretty much any hour of the day, and I can pretty much worry about anything, but my reaction often is to try to come up with a dark joke about it., Often in Black Mirror the ideas come from something I think is funny, even if we play the episode straight.
“I get more worried when I don't think people are worrying about the thing that's worrying me.”
Charlie Brooker shares his fears for the future of AI
What worries Brooker?
He describes social media platforms such as Twitter/X as a “terrifying echo chamber of people screaming”, but it’s the rise of AI that’s now keeping him awake at night.
“The waves of that tsunami are starting to lap up on the beach, and where that goes in the next few years is potentially terrifying,” Brooker says.
“If you can't tell what reality is, that's terrifying and I don't know how we navigate that. We've never really been faced with that before.”
He says people will either turn more sceptical or more gullible as the use of AI becomes more mainstream, and while he says our tech-savvy youth are far better placed to see through computer generated art than older generations, this brings its own complications.
“I can't work out how destabilising that will be because you're already seeing competing versions of reality out there, and that's worrisome, because I don't know how you solve the problems we've got, if you don't agree on what the problem is, or whether there is a problem.
“That genie isn't going back in the bottle, and it has the potential to be a remarkable tool.”
But he says the threat to his own career, and that of other writers and across all creative industries, is something he is struggling to get his own head around.
“As a writer, you look at something like Chat GPT and you immediately feel threatened. There's a 24 hour free version of me that you can just boss around.
“I don't think those tools are better than me – then I would say that – but I think they might be soon.
“Art is creative work. It's all an attempt by a human to communicate something to other humans. And once you remove the human from one end of that pipe, you've got a different theme park ride.”
But as a professional worrier, Brooker says he can be at his most mellow when things do go wrong – because he was always thinking of the worst thing that could happen.
“When the pandemic happened. I was oddly calm, because, in a way, I'd been worrying about something like that happening for quite a long time.
“When it did happen, you slightly think, 'Oh, well, everyone's vindicated this now’.”
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How dark humour can people feel ‘less alone’
Growing up, Brooker says he found solace in satirical TV comedy such as Spitting Image, which at the time was using its puppet cast to mock pressing themes of the day such as the threat of nuclear war – something he spent many of his younger years worrying about.
He says the dark sense of comfort he found in timely shows like this is something he’s strived to bring to his own work.
“I’d watch things like Spitting Image, and they would mock Ronald Reagan, and do dark humour about nuclear bombs,” he says.
“I found that reassuring because I felt like the world was crazy, but there's these other people trying to make us feel better this way.
“I think it does sometimes make you feel less alone.”
Black Mirror: Season 7 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Blurring of reality and entertainment in 2025
During the evolution of Black Mirror, Brooker says he has also surprised himself with how some of the early stories in the show's 14 year life have seemed more true to life as time has passed.
He names his 2013 episode, The Waldo Moment – about a computer animated bear who ends up running for election – as one such moment, given the political turmoil in the UK and across the world.
“At the time, I felt like I didn't really get the story right, and I should have spent a bit more time thinking about it, maybe made it a mini series, rather than an episode,” he says.
“Now it looks quite prescient, because I think it did capture something to do with a hunger for something different and a hunger for disruption.”
For the most part, Brooker admits that he avoids writing about politics or anything too similar to modern headlines – because those are dystopian enough for many viewers.
“I think now it's really difficult. It would be very difficult to try and outpace what's happening now and do a political story about that.
“Also, I think we're just so exhausted from the news.”
But while Brooker says he doesn't want the news to influence his TV work, with Keir Starmer suggesting Netflix drama Adolescence be shown in schools, instead we have television influencing headlines.
Black Mirror has stark messages for its viewers, but Brooker says it exists to "predominantly entertain", rather than inform society or teach lessons.
“One of the reasons Adolescence was so good is because it didn't tell you what to think, and it left a lot of things open ended,” he says.
“I think you just slightly recoil as a viewer if you feel that something is telling you what to think.”
The importance of a ‘human story’ in a tech-driven world
When it comes to his own work, especially in the era of AI, Brooker says there is nothing more important for his storytelling than ensuring there is an emotional connection for everyone watching.
“You have to have a really good, clear human story,” he adds.
“Quite often, I have ideas for episodes, and they'll percolate around for quite a long time. I'll have a concept or something about a topic or a moment I'm interested in.
“But until you know what the human story is, you're just writing an article.”
The new series of Black Mirror covers topics such as healthcare costs, merging humans with machines and – yes – the impact of AI.
Laced with dark humour and packed with death, romance and tragedy, Brooker insists his ultimate goal with this, and every series, is to entertain and uplift viewers – not leave them terrified of the world around them.
"We've got some hopeful episodes in there this season as well," he says.
"I don't want to just depress people into a sense of complete inertia or despair."
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