++Are you paying for mental health treatment out of pocket? It’s not supposed to be that way. +
++At a time when it seems Americans don’t agree on much, we agree on this: The US is in the throes of a mental health crisis, one that predates the pandemic but which the pandemic made impossible to ignore. +
++Yet finding a mental health provider and, crucially, getting health insurance to cover their services continues to be a struggle. +
++Longstanding federal laws are supposed to ensure that health insurers cover mental health care just as they do physical treatments. But 15 years after Congress passed a policy that was supposed to achieve “parity” for mental health care, we still don’t have it. It seems to be much easier to get insurers to pay for a broken bone or high blood pressure medication than it is to get addiction treatment or find a therapist. +
++A recent survey of nearly 2,800 US patients found that 40 percent of patients who had sought in-network mental health care had to make four or more calls to find a provider who would see them — compared to just 14 percent for physical health care. More than half of patients said they had had a claim for mental health care denied three or more times, compared to about one-third who had the same experience with physical services +
++Now the Biden administration is taking new steps to hold health insurers accountable and, they hope, make it easier for Americans to get mental and behavioral health care. +
++But those are promises that have been made before. Experts sound cautiously optimistic about Biden’s proposal, but it’s too early to say if this time it’s different. +
++Congress has been trying for decades to force insurers to cover mental health care. The first mental health parity law was passed in the late ’90s as a bipartisan consolation prize of sorts after Bill Clinton’s health care reform plans fizzled out. It was viewed as largely symbolic. Health insurers have an annual limit for how much patients can pay out of pocket for care, and the law required that the limit for mental health care costs be no higher than for other medical services. But given how unregulated the health insurance market was at the time, it did not have much of a practical effect. Sometimes health insurers didn’t cover mental health care at all. On the individual market, health insurers would disqualify people from coverage if they had mental health needs. +
++But in 2008, Congress took another pass at improving coverage for mental health services, attaching a bill to the must-pass financial bailout and establishing the rules that exist today. (The Affordable Care Act then extended these requirements to insurance sold on the law’s insurance marketplaces.) +
++The 2008 law went substantially further than the previous version of parity had. It did not require insurers to cover mental health care, though a combination of state and federal regulations have led to most insurance products in the US covering some mental health services. And if a health plan does cover that care, the law created certain standards that it must meet: +
+-
+
- +Insurers cannot place quantitative limits for inpatient or outpatient mental health services that were more stringent than the limits for other services. For example, a plan couldn’t limit a person to one day in a mental health treatment facility while covering five days for another type of hospital stay. + +
- +Insurers cannot charge higher copays or require higher out-of-pocket payments for mental health services than for physical care. They also are required to count any out-of-pocket payments by the patients toward their overall annual deductible. + +
- +Insurers are also supposed to eliminate or reduce other barriers to care, such as requirements for referrals. If they don’t pay mental health providers enough, leading few providers to work with their health plan, that’s also something they’re supposed to fix. + +
+It was a paradigm shift for health insurers. According to JoAnn Volk, co-director of the Georgetown Center on Health Insurance Reforms, insurance underwriters have told her that, prior to the parity law and the ACA’s ban on preexisting conditions, insurers would try to identify people with mental health issues in order to deny them coverage. Now, federal law was requiring them to provide benefits that were as generous for mental health as they were for other medical care. +
++“It is a massive shift,” Volk said. “You can’t avoid those people. You have to pay for what they need.” +
++What’s gone wrong with mental health parity — and Biden’s plan to fix it +
++Although the 2008 law was a big shift for insurers, it’s still a struggle for too many people to get mental health care. +
++The law itself doesn’t judge insurers based on patients’ actual ability to see a provider. Instead, it’s about paperwork/procedure: On paper, insurers cannot limit visits or inpatient stays and, according to experts, they usually do meet those mandates. A provider network, on paper, needs to be up to standard. But a doctor can be in-network and not taking new patients — a phenomenon that policy wonks call a phantom or ghost network. +
++Nevertheless, outcomes can still suggest that plans are failing to achieve true parity in mental health coverage. And the data does strongly suggest insurers have failed to meet the standards set by the 2008 legislation. +
++An insufficient number of mental health professionals (a 31,000-clinician shortage is projected for 2025) and the difficulty of finding one who is in your insurer’s provider network have conspired to make it too difficult for too many Americans to get mental health care. +
++According to a Milliman research report, US patients were five times more likely to use an out-of-network provider in 2017 for both inpatient and outpatient mental health care than they were for all other medical services. One in five office mental health visits was with an out-of-network provider. Reimbursement rates for primary care were 20 percent higher than they were for mental health care, on average. And those disparities actually got worse over the course of the 2010s. +
++All in all, the US has made it hard to find a mental health provider and hard to pay for their services. (Even if your provider does cover some of an out-of-network bill, the patient’s share will be higher than it would have been in-network). And this is with the parity law in effect. +
++What’s gone wrong? Some of the problem lies in the design of the law and its emphasis on procedure over outcomes. “It doesn’t guarantee great access — that patients can see the doctor they need and get the treatments they need,” Volk said. +
++Some of it is administrative. Enforcement of the parity rules is spread across the US Labor Department, Medicare and Medicaid, and state regulators. It has picked up more in the past few years, with lawsuits filed by state regulators against major insurers and administrative actions by the feds, but had been lax up to that point. The rules were slow to take effect in the first place, with the last of the initial regulations issued in 2016. +
++Some of it is cultural. Unfortunately, given the scale of mental health need in the US, insurers have a strong financial incentive to be stingy with covering mental health care. They are aided by the unavoidable reality that a lot of providers and patients have gotten used to working outside of insurance for mental health services. Patients pay their therapist directly, and that’s it. Now the health system is asking those providers to start dealing with the same paperwork that plagues other clinicians. +
++“They’re not used to doing the bookkeeping, the credentialing,” Volk said. But she stressed that was a small part of the problem compared to insurer compliance. “I don’t think insurers and plans have held up their part of the bargain.” +
++To address that problem, the Biden administration is taking new steps to strengthen enforcement of the parity rules. It is going to require insurers to perform an audit of their mental health benefits and specifically network adequacy, reimbursement rates, and how insurers use tools like prior authorization to limit access to mental health services. The goal is to perform a more outcomes-oriented evaluation of parity compliance, Volk said. +
++“It’s definitely a step forward,” she told me. +
++Administration officials have also been threatening the possibility of fines and additional legal actions to force health plans to follow the law. +
++The ultimate impact will depend on the follow-through. Congress has continued to tinker with the parity rules, including the 2020 amendment requiring insurers to perform a parity analysis that Biden is building upon, an implicit recognition of the failure thus far to actually achieve that elusive goal. +
++And with seemingly each new data point on the state of America’s mental health, the stakes for getting this right could only grow greater. +
++What we can learn from July’s record-breaking movie month. +
++For a few years, every summer movie season has felt like the weirdest one. There was the year when blockbusters started to balloon far beyond the margins of “summer.” There was the pandemic summer, when there were no blockbusters at all. The summer of 2021, with its in-between state and slowly reopening theaters, was headlined by a lot of really strange films. And last year’s off-kilter maximalism was so extra, even for spectacle blockbuster season, that I called it the “summer of swirly, googly, bombastic, over-the-top movies.” +
++The summer blockbuster season of 2023 seems on paper like the first normalish one in a long while. All of the elements are there. There have been franchise installments (Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Fast X), superhero installments (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, The Flash), and long-tail nostalgia sequels (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny). Alongside them are heavily marketed monster hits (the Barbenheimer juggernaut), a couple of low-budget specialty breakouts (Sound of Freedom and Talk to Me), respectable art-house releases (Past Lives), and a few scattered family movies raking in solid bucks (Elemental and, if you squint, Super Mario Bros too). +
++And after years of paltry returns, this summer’s been a whopper: July 2023 is the second-biggest month in box office returns in history. (The crown still belongs to July 2011, when the final Harry Potter movie was released.) +
+ ++Yet the lines haven’t fallen in the usual places. Mission: Impossible, Fast X, and Indiana Jones didn’t do nearly as well as some of their predecessors, an unexpected occurrence. All three opened well below the previous film in the series (in Indy’s case, $40 million below) and have been slower to earn as well. Meanwhile, Elemental, while raking in decent money, still struggled in comparison to its older Pixar siblings, and The Flash was an unqualified flop. +
++Not long ago, franchise films, superheroes, and Pixar releases were the backbone of summer blockbuster season; even last year, the No. 1 movie was Top Gun: Maverick. True to form, this summer did start (in April, because what is time anymore) with Super Mario Bros, which became a monster worldwide hit. Perhaps that was predictable, given the popularity of Mario and his buddies around the world. +
++But other hits have been less predictable. Sound of Freedom, for instance, a movie about child sex trafficking, was propelled along by deploying the “movie THEY don’t want you to see” culture war marketing playbook at a conservative audience. The movie’s unusual ticket sales model guarantees seats sold, if not butts in those seats, but money’s what matters, and Sound of Freedom has made bank, grossing more than $150 million in its US-based release. (That’s about $10 million more than what M:I - Dead Reckoning Part One has made in the US, though when you add the latter’s worldwide sales it comes out to nearly $450 million.) +
++That number has built some buzz around Sound of Freedom, which isn’t exactly the kind of spectacle- and effects-driven movie you go to in order to turn off your brain and enjoy your popcorn. But neither is Oppenheimer. Christopher Nolan remains one of the few reliably commercial blockbuster directors whose work is also genuinely challenging, and his three-hour biopic about the father of the atomic bomb — a movie which is almost entirely just men in rooms, talking about physics and politics — grossed $180 million in the US alone before its second week was over. +
+/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24827941/soundoffreedom.jpg)
Angel Studios
++That is astonishing on its own, but part of the reason Oppenheimer did so well, as anyone paying half an iota of attention realizes, is, hilariously, Barbie, which got linked with Oppenheimer in a clever portmanteau, spawned a meme with real-life box office consequences, and ended up grossing over twice what Oppenheimer did just in the US in its first two weeks. (It stands to reason that the female-coded Barbie also got an Oppenheimer bump from men who felt the Barbieheimer phenomenon gave them an excuse to see a movie they’d otherwise feel weird about. Thanks, society!) +
++On the surface, the two couldn’t be more different. Below the skin, they’re practically siblings, both wrestling with power, apocalypse, and existential dread. But that’s not why people went to see Barbie and Oppenheimer. It’s not why they saw Sound of Freedom, either, if we want to get real about it. +
++Put on your time-travel hat and sail back to 1975 for a moment, and then flick on a TV. There’s almost certainly a shark on it. Universal Pictures spent about $1.8 million marketing Jaws — a bit over $11 million in 2023 dollars. Set against the estimated $150 million spent marketing Barbie, that’s a tiny sum. But in the mid-70s, it was unheard of. A staggering $800,000 of it went toward TV ads, including 24 30-second commercials that aired in primetime on each major network in the two days before the film’s release. If you hadn’t read the novel it was based on, you might not know what it was about, but what you knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was that you had to go see Jaws. +
++Jaws set the rules in 1975: A blockbuster is not just an evening out or a random choice you make at the ticket counter. A blockbuster is defined by a huge theatrical rollout, preceded by advertising blanketed so thickly that people kind of get sick of it, copious tie-in merchandise, and a sense of urgency. (Independence Day outdid itself in that department.) +
++For a blockbuster to really hit it big, the audience has to be convinced that this is the best thing for them to do with their time, money, and friends. You’ve got to go see it or you’ll be left out. It’s an event. From the start, these kinds of films have tapped into a very particular kind of marketing: the kind that appeals to our human need to belong. +
++That’s what Barbenheimer somehow recaptured, and why people showed up in elaborate costumes to see the movies. The Sound of Freedom audience felt the same urgency through a campaign largely conducted through word of mouth: Your friends saw this movie, they posted about it, they want you to see it too, and it’s your moral duty to do so — plus, you want to talk about it. +
+ ++There’s a lesson in this story for an industry that has been fixated on platform-agnostic “content” for so long. You know what’s not (or at least rarely) an event? A movie that’s spat out onto a streaming platform that you can watch whenever you want, wherever you want, probably by yourself. That’s true for movies or for TV, and the industry used to know this. (Remember “Must-See TV”?) We still occasionally recapture the magic, as the excitement around the final season of Succession or bigger shows like House of the Dragon demonstrate. +
++Believe it or not, people actually like to have their lives interrupted by the art they find entertaining. People don’t feel urgency around entertainment that they can get to whenever they want; if anecdotal experience is any indication, they’ll just never get around to it. The things that excite us, that cause us to spend money (which is, in the end, the point for the distributors) are happenings. We plan and save and post about Taylor Swift concerts and Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom drops, and we rearrange our schedules to make sure we can engage with them when everyone else is. Movies aren’t different, and movie theaters, done right, are the perfect venue for event-izing screen-based entertainment — which, when we get down to it, is still just about the cheapest night-out activity there is. +
++The fact that the summer of Barbie is also the summer of strikes should tell us something. Most of what the writers and actors are striking about has to do with changes wrought by the propulsive, weirdly death-wish-style push toward content sent down tubes at consumers’ convenience. The most likely use of AI in that context is just to generate more of it more cheaply. But will anyone be watching? +
++The Barbieheimer weekend was for me, a film critic, one of the most heartening things I’ve seen in a long time. I don’t mind if people liked or hated the movies, what was exciting was watching people get excited to see them, and then, even more importantly, to talk about them. Yes, the “discourse” (especially on social media) sometimes made me want to bang my head on the counter, but that’s part of what’s great about giant communal forms of entertainment, and in the end, I loved it. +
++That weekend also revealed that there’s a long way to go if the theatrical experience will be saved. I’ve spoken with many people who say they avoid theaters largely because their local multiplexes are shoddy big-box operations that are dirty or loud or disruptive and that films are often projected poorly or in the wrong format. During screenings of Oppenheimer in particular, widespread issues made it clear that the art of great projection is in danger of going extinct, in part because nearly all movies are shot and projected digitally now, and in part because movie theaters are understaffed. +
++But despite what it has going against it, the movie industry isn’t dead yet, and movies don’t have to die. Recapturing the art of creating an event out of a movie might be an uphill climb for an industry that has been fixated on other matters, but if Hollywood wants to keep itself from the brink, it’s a lesson they’re going to have to agree, finally, to re-learn. +
++A chat with Charlie Brooker about AI, creativity, and why tech can be like growing an extra limb. +
++It’s tough to remember, but in 2011, lots of us felt pretty good about our Silicon Valley overlords. The iPhone was going fully mainstream, Facebook felt like a fun place to share ideas, and Twitter was going to somehow liberate us from tyrants. +
++That was also the year Black Mirror debuted in the UK (it would come to Netflix in the US five years later) and offered a different point of view: What if all of this shiny new stuff wasn’t good for us, at all? +
++Since then, we’ve had a real reckoning about tech — or, at a minimum, our views about tech have gotten much more complicated. +
++Which, it turns out, is the way Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker has always felt about this stuff: “I love technology, I love computers,” he told me this week on the Recode Media podcast. “But I’m also a natural worrier. I’m somebody who catastrophizes at the drop of a hat. And so I’m often worried when some new development or gizmo will give us power, and the responsibility that comes with that. And how easy it is to misuse that, or the unintended consequences or obvious clumsy consequences. … Usually our technologies give with one hand and sort of slap us round the back of the head with the other.” +
++Brooker often gets credit for creating scripts that seem eerily prescient on issues we’re just about to confront, and he pulled that off again with the newest season of Black Mirror, which debuted earlier this summer. Its first episode, which aired on Netflix just as writers and actors began to worry that Hollywood wanted to replace them with AI, features a tech executive who finds out her life has been turned into a Netflix-style show that’s been entirely created by an AI. +
+ ++Brooker, not surprisingly, isn’t very interested in using AI to help create his shows. But as we discussed, there’s a bit of nuance there: Current generative AI tech uses existing images and text to help create new, or at least newish, stuff. And writers like Brooker have always used other people’s work to inspire their own. Or in his words: “parasitically hoovering up something” someone else wrote. But I wouldn’t expect a ChatGPT version of Black Mirror anytime soon. +
++You can read excerpts from our conversation, edited for length and clarity, below, and you can listen to the whole thing here. +
++
++Peter Kafka +
++How do you feel about the fact that people use Black Mirror as shorthand for “tech dystopia”? +
++Charlie Brooker +
++On the one hand, I’m delighted, obviously. It’s free publicity for the show. But equally, it’s often depressing on a human level that that’s the stuff we’re looking at and confronted by a lot of the time. +
++But it’s not always about technology. When people say that, sometimes they’re talking about talking about a fucked-up situation. People will often say “black mirror” as shorthand for a fucked-up situation. If you look at our first-ever episode with the prime minister and the pig, that’s the very definition of a sort of fucked-up situation. +
++Peter Kafka +
++What do you make of the fact that you’ve been making this show for more than a decade, and it’s very popular, so clearly people in Silicon Valley have seen it. And you’re saying, “This vision of the future that I have is bad. This is not good.” And then [tech executives] come out and say, “We think this is great. We’re going to productize this.” Whether it’s VR goggles or AI-generated people or whatever. What do you think of that disconnect? +
++Charlie Brooker +
++One thing I would say is that sometimes, clearly in the show, I’m highlighting something and saying, “This is bad.” Usually, however, the technology isn’t actually the villain. We’ve done an episode with autonomous robot killer dogs going around killing people. +
++Peter Kafka +
++Not positive. +
++Charlie Brooker +
++Not really a positive read on that. But they were still presumably created by a human in that story. +
++But most of the time, when an episode is classically Black Mirror, you’ve got something that’s actually quite miraculous. That as a viewer, you can see the desirability of it. You can see why it would be useful, you can see why it would be transformative and in many ways extremely positive. And it’s usually the human beings, the messy human beings who are using this stuff in the story, who manage to balls things up. +
++And I guess that that reflects how I feel about a lot of things. In real life, I’m pretty geeky and techie. I used to be a video games journalist and I kind of love all this stuff. I love technology, I love computers. +
++But I’m also a natural worrier. I’m somebody who catastrophizes at the drop of a hat. It may come as no surprise to anyone who has watched the show. And so I’m often worried about some when new development or gizmo will give us power, and the responsibility that comes with that. And how easy it is to misuse that, or the unintended consequences or obvious clumsy consequences. And we see that time and time again with things. Usually our technologies give with one hand and sort of slap us round the back of the head with the other. +
++But that’s been the case with the printing press, it’s been the case with everything. I wouldn’t want to delete this stuff from existence necessarily. +
++Peter Kafka +
++Your show started in 2011. Back then, we were enormously optimistic about consumer technology, whether it was iPhones or social media. Serious people thought Twitter might bring democracy to the Middle East. Things have swung back dramatically in the opposite direction. Do you think that was always inevitable? +
++Charlie Brooker +
++We were clearly looking at it through extremely rose-tinted goggles at the time. That was the thing in a way, I was tapping into in my head, certainly in some of those early episodes. Most Apple adverts looked to me like — have you seen Soylent Green? +
++Peter Kafka +
++Of course. +
++Charlie Brooker +
++There’s a bit where somebody is euthanized — an old guy is euthanized. And he’s taken into a sort of euthanasia clinic and the last thing he’s shown is images of the natural world which has now been destroyed. And it sort of moves him to tears and then he’s killed and turned into food, basically. +
++Peter Kafka +
++Which someone in Silicon Valley thought would be a good brand. +
++Charlie Brooker +
++Well, there you go. I mean, that’s the ultimate sort of example. But the imagery there — the sort of pleasant imagery that this guy was shown against this extremely dystopian black backdrop — that was the sense I was always getting from sort of Apple ads at the time. They just seemed to be showing everybody having fun and dancing and smiling. And you just think, “Well, hang on a minute. Things usually aren’t this positive.” +
++And if we suddenly have extremely powerful tools at our disposal, we will do incredible things. We will also make incredible fuckups. So that seemed to me a well-founded concern I had that I felt wasn’t reflected at the time. +
++And I remember the positivity around the Arab Spring and people feeling that Twitter was bringing democracy to the Middle East. And now that all seems extremely naive. I think it was always inevitable that we were going to cock things up a bit. +
++But I wouldn’t want to be just completely cynical. The analogy I always use is that — especially something like social media — it’s like we’ve suddenly grown an extra limb, which is amazing because it means you could juggle and scroll through your iPhone at the same time. But it also means that we’re not really sure how to control it yet. +
++I do get frustrated sometimes when people characterize the show as “the tech is bad show” sort of thing. And I think sometimes I react to that probably too much. +
++Peter Kafka +
++You mentioned AI at the beginning of this conversation. In the space of a year we went from, “Look at this interesting AI art, isn’t that cool or trippy?” to, “Oh, AI could write a script with Chat GPT” to, “Now maybe AI is going to make a whole movie or a TV show.” Do you think about AI as a tool and/or as a threat? +
++Charlie Brooker +
++I think it’s kind of both. The thing that actually depresses me almost more than anything else is — I’ve got two kids and one of them is 9 years old and he’s getting into drawing and he’s good. Really good, especially for his age. He’s proudly drawing, doodling away. And I was looking at this, and encouraging him, well done. And then the next thought that arrived was, “Yeah, but I mean, being an illustrator, that’s no career path these days, is it?” +
++And then our oldest is really into coding. And I’m thinking, yeah, but are you learning? Is this like learning mathematics, and now the calculators come along and render that like… a machine’s just going to do the icky bits of coding for you. +
++So I do very much worry about what the impact on employment generally is going to be. +
++I toyed around with all those things, Midjourney and stuff, like anyone else. And it’s telling — the images that go viral, that sort of thing; the things that are appealing are all kind of mashups, aren’t they? They’re all combinations of things. So I would type in, “Show me Jack the Ripper in the Great British Bake Off tent” or something like that. “Show me Boris Johnson shaking hands with Paddington Bear on the set of Seinfeld.” Because it’s parasitically hoovering up stuff that we humans have made or created or are. So quite quickly, with the AI art, there was something generic about it. Either it was riffs on existing IP or it was fairly somehow sort of too slick, like an auto-tuned vocal. +
++Peter Kafka +
++Yeah, you can see it. +
++Charlie Brooker +
++And things like Chat GPT, I can totally see the value in using it as a sort of hyperpowered Google. “Oh, quick: List 10 jobs that somebody in Victorian England might have done.” I can imagine that as a writing tool. And the scary thing is I can imagine people using it to generate something that they then claim to own, which isn’t good enough to actually pass muster, that you’d have to then hire a human in, cheaply, to knock into shape. +
++It should be like the tools in Photoshop. I’m not scared by most of the tools in Photoshop. I think they’re super useful for artists. +
++Hopefully one outcome is it makes us up our game. It’s interesting at the moment, that we’ve had a lot of formulaic movies and stuff. Not to slight superhero movies — it’s just that there’s a lot of them. +
++Peter Kafka +
++And the audience seems exhausted. +
++Charlie Brooker +
++Exhausted. Because I think that it does feel like you could say to Chat GPT, “Knock out the beats of a superhero [movie].” You know what the story beats are going to be. +
++Peter Kafka +
++Do you imagine using it? I’ve talked to folks who say, “Yeah, it’s good to make a terrible first draft, because I’d rather look at a bad first draft than a blank page,” or, “I can kick around ideas and a hundred ideas will be bad but one will be good. And that’s useful for me.” +
++Charlie Brooker +
++I don’t think it’s at the point where it could write an even serviceable vomit draft. I don’t know that I trust its ability to generate an idea. Now riffing on an idea that you’ve got yourself? I can potentially see that. +
++But because it’s hoovering up other people’s stuff … Another thing I did [with Chat GPT] was type in, “Give me an idea for a Black Mirror episode.” And it immediately came back with things that … were fairly generic. They were emulation software’s idea of what a Black Mirror story is. And that just made me feel kind of self-parasitic. +
++It’s just leeching off me. And I’d be quite cross if somebody else was using it to leech off me. It’s probably seen somewhere that Black Mirror is a bit like The Twilight Zone, so it’s probably leeching off Rod Serling. It’s probably leeching off RoboCop, Starship Troopers — all these brilliant things that I found very influential … +
++Peter Kafka +
++And you did [that] as a human. You took all that stuff … +
++Charlie Brooker +
++So, yeah, I mean, I can see that argument as well. Certainly, there’s episodes of Black Mirror that are directly inspired … We did an episode called “USS Callister,” which is a sort of Star Trek story. And it’s very directly inspired by an episode of The Twilight Zone called “It’s a Good Life,” where there’s an ultra-powerful 6-year-old boy, who can … +
++Peter Kafka +
++It’s terrifying. +
++Charlie Brooker +
++It’s terrifying and it still holds up today, and it’s absolutely chilling and terrifying. And I was trying to think of, weirdly, a very different story idea to do with people in the workplace, put into a musical, like a virtual musical, like Grease the Musical. And they wouldn’t know what their roles were. So I might be Sandy and you might be Danny, but we wouldn’t know — the real us wouldn’t know. I was sort of toying around with that idea, and then I thought, “God, you could do so many powerful things.” And as soon as I thought — “Well, what if this is a story about a tyrant? I remember that Twilight Zone episode …” +
++So now that is an example of me, I guess, parasitically hoovering up something that Rod Serling wrote, putting it through my own little AI in my brain. I guess you just call it “I.” There’s nothing artificial about it. Just my I. +
++Peter Kafka +
++And you created something wholly new. It’s one of your best episodes, most acclaimed. +
++Charlie Brooker +
++I’m very proud of that episode. But hopefully that’s a different process because I’m saying, I owe Rod Serling a debt there. There was a heavy influence. I suppose [AI] feels like this is doing it on an industrial scale. +
++Peter Kafka +
++And you recoil at that. As you know, right now there’s a debate, with the actors and writers strike, about how much AI we are going to allow into our entertainment. Do you think that that’s a real fear for writers and actors — that studios would really want to use AI to replace much of what they do? +
++Charlie Brooker +
++I think it’s a real fear. I think the fear with writing is that the studio could use it to generate vomit drafts of things, and then hire human writers to depressingly rewrite it. And make it human. And that’s a very depressing state of affairs. +
++Peter Kafka +
++But let me just play devil’s advocate for a second. Because it’s very standard in your business to have someone write a draft, and then fire that person, and then bring in multiple people, multiple times, to come and make that draft better. Or oftentimes worse. +
++Charlie Brooker +
++That’s very cynical! I’ve grown up in the old Britain, where it’s quite different here — the ruthless sort of Hollywood side of writing looks terrifying to me! I’ve had a very lucky existence as a writer. Maybe I’ve got too rose-y tinted a view. +