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HBO’s Casey Bloys Wants to Be ‘Retired’ Before ChatGPT Takes Over TV

Samantha Bergeson
·2 min read

For HBO and Max, ChatGPT is not the way of the future.

CEO and chairman Casey Bloys addressed the debate over A.I. in the writers room during a Variety TV FYC event. The rise of artificial intelligence is one contention of the ongoing WGA strike.

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“Two things to keep in mind when I say this: One is, remember I grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which is Steel Town. So I am very, very aware of what happens when a company does not think about the future or is not aware of the future,” Bloys said. “But also, I’ve been at HBO for 19 years and I have never tested a pilot to decide whether to pick it up or not. We just don’t use all of the things other places do, it’s just not something we do. So my take on A.I., the idea that A.I. would be involved in any sort of development or the creative process in the kinds of shows that I do, or we do, at HBO, that’s not something I want to be a part of.”

He added, “If it does become something — and I hope I don’t sound like a steel executive in the ’70s — I just can’t see it. And if it is, I hope to God I’m retired by that point.”

“Black Mirror” creator Charlie Brooker recently shared that he attempted to enlist ChatGPT to write an episode of the hit Netflix series. However, the final product turned out to be “shit.”

“I’ve toyed around with ChatGPT a bit,” Brooker said. “The first thing I did was type ‘generate “Black Mirror” episode’ and it comes up with something that, at first glance, reads plausibly, but on second glance, is shit.”

Brooker continued, “Because all it’s done is look up all the synopses of ‘Black Mirror’ episodes, and sort of mush them together. Then if you dig a bit more deeply you go, ‘Oh, there’s not actually any real original thought here.'”

Yet the computer-generated program did alert Brooker to redundancies in his own writing.

“I was aware that I had written lots of episodes where someone goes, ‘Oh, I was inside a computer the whole time!'” he concluded. “So I thought, ‘I’m just going to chuck out any sense of what I think a ‘Black Mirror’ episode is.’ There’s no point in having an anthology show if you can’t break your own rules.”

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