The much anticipated new season of Black Mirror has landed on NetFlix, and unsurprisingly perhaps, one episode features a darkly prescient look at the direction deepfake tech could take. Although the episode doesn’t appear to feature deepfake porn as such, it explores the even more dystopian potential of the deepfaking of personalities and lives, something which I have discussed here myself a little in recent weeks. With social media influencers already allowing themselves to be turned into AI girlfriend bots, and a Romanian developer ‘cloning’ his partner and uploading his ‘GirlfriendGPT’ Python code to GitHub, it seems only a matter of time before Deepfake porn takes a darker twist. I would suggest it will be a matter of only months until we see the first viral media horror story of an ex-boyfriend using the private sex texts, selfies, and videos of his former partner, to turn her into an AI girlfriend available for all on some seedy deepfake forum.
The first episode of “Black Mirror’s” new, sixth season features a tableau with which its viewers will likely be intimately familiar: A couple, sitting on their couch, deciding what to stream in the evening. This being “Black Mirror,” their choice of programming will have mind-bending consequences; this being latter-day “Black Mirror,” it’s also a reflexive comment on its medium.
In “Joan Is Awful,” a woman (Annie Murphy) watches a series that seems directly cribbed from her life, one in which she’s played by Salma Hayek Pinault and in which every interaction she has is blown up to show her to her worst advantage. Everyone else watches it too: Such is the power of the fictional-but-barely “Streamberry,” a service with Netflix’s aesthetic, reach, and industry-conquering ambition.
In “Joan Is Awful,” Streamberry ruins poor Joan’s life, but without particular malice. She’s a Warholian superstar for the #Scandoval age, a figure of disgust at the center of the entertainment universe, but the same could have easily happened to anyone: Joan is just a widget.
Review from Variety Magazine.
