[You’re okay, Computer — it’s the corporations that
aren’t.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

BLACK MIRROR’S BIG AI EPISODE HAS THE WRONG VILLAIN  
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Rebecca Ackermann
June 23, 2023
Vox
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_ You’re okay, Computer — it’s the corporations that aren’t.
_

Joan (Annie Murphy) isn’t nearly as awful as a computer that steals
lives., Nick Wall/Netflix

 

_Black Mirror_, TV’s best-crafted tech-dystopian anthology series,
is back with a sixth season, just in time for a new wave of horrifying
real-world concerns: crypto crashes, data breaches, and, most
urgently, a horde of capitalists foaming at the mouth to replace human
labor with generative AI
[[link removed]].

The first episode of the season, “Joan Is Awful,” takes on this
trend toward automation within the entertainment industry in
particular, a concern the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) have
been protesting through their ongoing strike
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with the Stage Actors’ Guild (SAG-AFTRA) poised to join them
[[link removed]].
Over the last decade, streamers have tilted industry development and
payment standards toward unsustainable volumes of content for watchers
and unsustainably low wages for writers. Now industry executives are
staking claim to actors’ voices
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stories
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and user data
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future automated entertainment too. Netflix
[[link removed]], the industry-defining streaming service
that airs _Black Mirror_ (and outbid the network that originated
the series
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that right), is one of the biggest targets
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the strike — and _Black Mirror_’s latest season takes aim at the
streamer, too.

_Black Mirror_ lobs sideways shots at Netflix in a few episodes, but
the target in “Joan Is Awful” is direct and timely; a
distinctively red logo-ed service called Streamberry uses a glittering
quantum computer to transform a generative AI thought experiment into
TV programming, ruining lives along the way. But while the episode
does a humorously vivid (and star-studded) job of imagining a future
where anyone’s life could become IP for prestige TV, and any
actor’s face (and less ready-for-primetime parts) could be
contracted as digital puppetry, the show’s usually incisive arrow
ultimately misses the heart of the issue. Streamberry’s
“Quamputer,” as the AI machine is named, holds the blame for the
episode’s disasters, and destroying its magic light show yields a
happy ending. In the real AI story, however, the villains are human,
not miraculous machinery — which is exactly why so many writers and
actors are counting on collective action to make a difference.

The episode, written by _Black Mirror _creator Charlie Brooker,
sidesteps the fact that it’s tech, media, and entertainment industry
executives who are choosing a _Black Mirror_-esque future for us all,
not some faceless computer. Any satisfying conclusion to this concern
will be the result of human, not technological, transformation.

In “Joan Is Awful,” Joan (_Schitt’s Creek_’s Annie Murphy)
discovers she’s become the main character of the day writ large:
Streamberry has created a show based on her life, starring an
AI-generated Salma Hayek (played by the real Hayek), whose likeness
the company has contracted from the actress. Each episode airs shortly
after Joan’s real day, turning her secrets into plot points and her
screw-ups into laugh lines. As a result, Joan’s life falls apart and
she attempts to gain Hayek’s attention so they can leverage the
star’s power to shut down the series.

It works, to a point: After Joan makes a disgusting scene that
Hayek’s digital version is compelled to repeat, Hayek commands her
lawyer to get her out of the Streamberry contract. But the star’s
agreement is ironclad (page 39, paragraph 8 includes all acts up to
and “beyond defecation”), as are the user terms and conditions
that allowed Streamberry to make content out of Joan’s life events
in the first place. If this story is a whodunnit, the company’s
lawyers and executives have blood on their hands — but they remain
offscreen. There’s nothing cutting-edge about a deal with the devil.
(In fact, the last episode in the season, “Demon 79,” set in the
late 1970s, begins with just that biblical contract.) _Black
Mirror_ gets that part right.

[Two people standing in front of a screen displaying a streaming
service chyron for a show called “Joan Is Awful”]

At Streamberry’s headquarters, things are not quite as they seem.

 Nick Wall/Netflix

When Joan and Salma Hayek arrive at Streamberry headquarters, they
find their way into the computer room, where a beautifully
Apple-styled and sized “Quamputer,” or quantum computer, is
running the show. Joan grabs a handy ax to smash the computer, and
turtlenecked Streamberry CEO Mona Javadi (Leila Farzad) begs for mercy
for the artificial lives and shows that would evaporate without the
machine’s fairy dust. (“We don’t know how it works!” she
screams. “It’s basically magic!”) Joan destroys the machine
anyway, freeing herself and all the generated Joans contained within.

Skipping a couple of twists, the episode ends with Joan in a new job
and a new life, content to figure out how to be the protagonist of a
much smaller story. It’s a hopeful conclusion and a human one, in
line with the rest of the new season of _Black Mirror_, which offers
the unmistakable impression that Charlie Brooker is as sick of writing
about tech’s dark reflection as the rest of us are of living in it.

But what about that Streamberry CEO? What about the system that
compelled her to delegate creativity to ones and zeros? In the
episode, Javadi tells a cowed reporter that the machine prefers
negative storylines to positive ones for higher engagement. But who
pressed the button to operationalize that strategy in “Joan Is
Awful”? (We know who made an eerily similar choice in the real
world [[link removed]]: Facebook’s and
Twitter’s executives.) Brooker has said that when it comes to AI,
“you can’t put the genie back into the bottle.
[[link removed]]”
In “Joan Is Awful,” smashing one glass iBottle seems to fix the
problem. Won’t the fictional CEO and others like her rebuild the
same tech with the same goals for the same paying customers? AI is
made of people. So why are the people in power let off the narrative
hook?

In real life, the move toward AI wasn’t triggered by a serendipitous
technological discovery like a “Quamputer,” and it hasn’t been
deterred by a single point of failure, either. Corporations and
research institutions have been working on machine learning and large
language models for decades
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and the decision to pour more money into AI development is a business
one. The bet is that AI will increase productivity, scale markets, and
decrease costs enough to justify an estimated $154 billion
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spending on AI by the end of 2023. Prominent AI researcher Timnit
Gebru has called the current AI craze a “gold rush
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and argued that the industry needs better regulation to escape the
controlling “profit motive” powering development. A machine that
can generate personalized content for every person on the planet is
not magic; it’s what happens when tech advancement meets late-stage
capitalism. But _Black Mirror_’s “Joan Is Awful” is
uncharacteristically silent on that distinction.

Of course, Charlie Brooker can’t solve capitalism. A high-budget
show paid for and hosted by the second-largest
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service in the US cannot bring down generative AI or deliver a win to
entertainment industry unions. But popular art does play an essential
role in the cultural conversation about technology and its
all-too-human puppet masters. For over a decade, _Black Mirror_ has
been one of our sharpest critics of the dark side of innovation,
sparking discussions around technology’s influence on politics,
creative industries, personal privacy, and society’s shifting moral
lines. Through _Black Mirror_’s sensitively drawn portraits of
people and relationships trapped in crises of faith, the show’s
title — a reference to the way a screen, be it smartphone, tablet,
computer, or television [[link removed]], looks in the off
position — has even become cultural shorthand for the unsettling
sensation of living in a future not quite designed for the more
complex realities of the human condition.

Since the show first aired in 2011, the tech industry has only grown
in power and influence, as companies embed technology even more
profoundly into our culture and economy. (For context, Uber launched
in 2011, Zoom in 2012, Doordash in 2013. Apple released the iPad in
2015, and Google put out the Google Home in 2016.)

Today, AI might be the most pressing industry concern — but not
because the singularity is on its way, as many AI thought leaders
warn
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Murphy, who portrays Joan in “Joan Is Awful,” recently said
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“hurts her guts” that “we are alive in a time when people are
having to ask and beg for their jobs ... not to be replaced by
computers.” It’s the begging that’s gut-twisting, not the
computers. And it’s the humans hearing those pleas who are turning
the knife. That’s a _Black Mirror_ tale if I ever heard one.

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* artificial intelligence
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* Corporations
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* corporate power
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* Big Tech
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* entertainment industry
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