What would you do if your life was replicated and published for entertainment? In the era of voice data personalised advertising, extensively long terms and condition lists, cookie collecting and personal AI’s, it wouldn’t be a stretch of a statement to assume that this could happen in the near future. Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror’s anticipated release of season 6 saw the primary episode exploring issues around data privacy, and for most of us, it hit a little too close to home.
We see Joan’s day; starting off by laying off an employee, followed by reconnecting with her ex and sharing a kiss, then finally confessing to her therapist that she finds her boyfriend bland, ‘like his cooking’. This is not exactly something we’d want reanimated for the general public, right? As Joan and her boyfriend, Krish, settle down to watch ‘Stream- Berry’, a nod to Black Mirror’s streaming platform, ‘Netflix’, ‘Joan is Awful’ appears; Salma Hayek sporting Joan’s distinctive blonde fringe in an apparent remake of Joan’s day.
The episode strikes unnerving points of comparison with our real life media consumption habits. After it was disclosed that Joan had agreed to this exploitation through the terms and conditions, I, along with I am sure many other watchers, felt chills run down my back. In an era of data saturation, what have we agreed to already?
And as AI and smart computers integrate their way into the bare bones of society, what could we agree to in the future? Later on, Salma Hayek invokes herself into the legal battle after Joan, in retaliation to her series, purposefully defecates in a church to acquire Salma’s attention; the resultant episode depicting Salma committing this act. The purchase of image rights by intelligence companies falls directly under the issues established in the recent Hollywood strikes, with the incorporation of AI tools by producers reforming media production.
Additionally, recently we have seen the first case of this, with Bruce Willis selling his image rights to an AI intelligence company, ‘Deepcake’. Viewers can't help but wonder about the future of entertainment production; with producers favouring quantity over authenticity, what are the implications when a film can be created in an hour? In the finale both Salma and Joan break into the StreamBerry HQ; in order to physically destroy the quantum computer in charge of producing these AI productions, when it is revealed that they are an AI production themselves.
Brooker, in a statement to Netflix, recognised that AI content “has no genuinely original ideas of its own: It hoovers up material other people have already written – without paying them for the privilege – and attempts to pass itself off as human. And in doing so, churns out stuff that’s either generic or derivative”. Consequentially in this episode, it was revealed that Joan and Salma were not in reality, but in fictive level 2, which was replicated from fictive level 1, and this replicated from the source Joan in the Joan multiverse.
Brooker takes a comedic approach to the exploitation of algorithm generated entertainment, drawing on the specificity of the lack of new content. Joan and Salma decide to destroy the machine, eradicating their fictive level, doing this under the guise that the source Joan must have done this same thing. It would have been impossible for their own storyline to have been manifested through AI without an original muse.
The episode ends depicting source Joan having opened up her own coffee shop, and is friends with Annie Murphy (fictive source level’s Salma Hayek), all whilst under house arrest. She tells her therapist, ironically, that she finally feels like the main character in her life. This episode explores effectively, future manifestations of our concerns regarding data privacy and its implications on material life.
It covers an incredibly relevant topic relating to the recent AI Hollywood strike, and inhibits a cynical take upon the use of AI generated content. Crucially, Brooker is warning us of the merging of the real and produced, and possibly in the future we need to stick to one rule; read the terms and conditions!