Speculative Fiction

So I'm not a screenwriter, but in my head, I've been compiling ideas for a spec script for an episode of the dystopian near-future anthology Black Mirror. I don't want to give away any of the details because, like most creative types, I live with the crushingly easily falsifiable belief that if my GENIUS IDEA gets leaked anywhere into the public sphere, Fat Cat Hollywood will swoop in, steal it, make ONE ZILLION DOLLARS off of it, leaving me high and dry. Like all made-up afflictions, the only real protection are hokum folk remedies, none of which are afforded by the internet, a body in which going viral is the actual goal. So the only safe thing to do is to keep it locked inside my head for now, kept warm by the frictive dissonance of knowing how impossible it is to get anywhere in show business rubbing up against the rock-solid certainty of my idea's inevitability.

It does't matter anyway, though, because if nothing else, Black Mirror has proven incapable of being able to keep up with the satirization of real life. It's exceedingly difficult to explore the thought-experimental ramifications of current events and behavioral trends when you live in a world where all of the flat ground has been systematically replaced by only all slippery slopes everywhere. Any idea one might have to make a state of affairs seem ominous or potentially silly is, at every turn, outpaced by the goings-on of day-to-day living. It's like entering a clown car into a Formula 1 race, but somehow the clown car is honking and seltzering its way to a full lap's lead with relative ease.

Like, nothing I'm going to come up with is going to be as dramatically and jaw-droppingly stupid as the farce of "artificial intelligence" as it currently exists, in the abstract, or the completely out-of-the-blue insertion of it directly into the most sensitive parts of the government with no warning, training or context.

If you don't know, all military service members and Department of Defense War civilian employees had GenAI pop up as a shortcut on their government-issued workstations all at once last week, together simultaneously with a memo from Secretary of Pull-Ups Pete Hegseth giving zero guidance past, and I'm BARELY paraphrasing here, "you'll use this if you're not a total pussy."

Without burning my sources, I will say, this has been the first time I've seen large language models up close in action and this one... yeah, it's so useless it's actually dangerous. It's not just that it gives wrong answers to basic questions, it's designed to do so in human-emotional language so a) you won't get mad at it for being wrong, and b) it will give you confidence to keep using it, so long as you aren't interested in how it reaches its conclusions. It's like being handed a shovel handle with no spade on the end, but they gave it a pair of googly eyes. Sure, it can't do anything like the job you need doing (and may actually be a hindrance), but awwww, look at the funny little guy! You can't throw away a funny little guy!

It will--and this is true--tell you it is 100% certain about an answer you know to be wrong. And then when you point out that it's wrong, it will profusely apologize and praise you for your keen, piercing insight. It will also (someone told me!) explicitly admit that it is designed to provide useful answers, not correct answers. The criteria for what is "useful" isn't that important or interesting, but the point is, "correct" is an aspect of "useful" in the program as it currently stands, but it's nowhere near definitive or required as a component of a response. What's more important is that you feel as though it's done a job, with the finitudinal confidence of 100% certainty, without any regard for whether it's reflecting 100% of anything, let alone certainty. That's one of the hardest things to have 100% of!

So my Black Mirror idea about a whistleblower/retired ninja in a world where weekly personal blogging ended up on a J-curve trend-line instead of blowing away like a house made of straw or perhaps sticks back in like 2005, so he's also a celebrated cultural figure as well, but he ends up in a battle of wits, nerve and probably some throwing stars against a swaggering artificial intelligence vying for control of the nation's nuclear arsenal and porn sites, well, that's just going to have to get shoved into the dustbin of other GREAT IDEAS I've had as being too pedestrian now. Like my old half-written teleplay where Ronald Reagan eventually becomes a hated villain, it's just become passé. Back to the drawing board.