Joan Is Awful: Black Mirror episode is every striking actor’s worst nightmare

With the most recent season of Black Mirror, you sensed that Charlie Brooker was keen to move away from his reputation as a prophet. Time and time again since his series hit the air, it has managed to correctly predict the future in all sorts of horrible ways. But this season felt like it was deliberately skewing away from reality precisely to avoid this happening again. After all, unless a hapless demon destroys Earth – or unless Britney Spears literally turns into a werewolf – then Brooker is probably in much safer territory.

Reader, it has happened already. Less than a month after it debuted, the Black Mirror episode Joan Is Awful has already become the unlikely figurehead of the potential Screen Actor’s Guild strike.

If you haven’t seen it, Joan Is Awful is the story of a woman who, at the end of each day, realises with horror that her actions have been folded into a Dropout-style biographical drama, where all her bad traits and regrettable decisions are played out onscreen by Salma Hayek. Except, as the episode goes along, we learn that it isn’t Hayek at all; it’s an AI-generated likeness of Hayek, commissioned by unethical executives working for a monolithic streaming platform. While it might not be the driving force of the episode, “AI will eventually replace all actors” is certainly a theme that runs throughout Joan is Awful.

It couldn’t be more timely. A sticking point of the near-inevitable Sag-Aftra strike is the potential that AI could soon render all screen actors obsolete. A union member this week told Deadline: “Actors see Black Mirror’s Joan Is Awful as a documentary of the future, with their likenesses sold off and used any way producers and studios want. We want a solid pathway. The studios countered with ‘trust us’ – we don’t.”

It’s a similar line to the one currently taken by the striking WGA writers. Eventually, they claim, technology will advance enough to make an AI-generated script that is indistinguishable from one created by a human. These scripts would be cheap and instant, and – even though they’re essentially composite jobs, made by scraping existing scripts – they would immediately put an entire profession out of work.

The Sag-Aftra fears, however, are a little more primal. If a studio has the kit, not to mention the balls, to deepfake Tom Hanks into a movie he didn’t agree to star in, then it has the potential to upend the entire industry as we know it. It’s one thing to have your work taken from you, but it’s another to have your entire likeness swiped.

The issue is already creeping in from the peripheries. The latest Indiana Jones movie makes extensive use of de-ageing technology, made by grabbing every available image of Harrison Ford 40 years ago and feeding it into an algorithm. Peter Cushing has been semi-convincingly brought back to life for Star Wars prequels, something he is unlikely to have given permission for unless the Disney execs are particularly skilled at the ouija board. ITV’s recent sketch show Deep Fake Neighbour Wars took millions of images of Tom Holland and Nicki Minaj, and slapped them across the faces of young performers so adeptly that it would be very easy to be fooled into thinking that you were watching the real celebrities in action.

Unsurprisingly, Sag-Aftra members want this sort of thing to be regulated, asking for their new labour contract to include terms about when AI likenesses can be used, how to protect against misuse, and how much money they can expect from having their likenesses used by AI.

It’s a big, complicated, profound thing to have to negotiate, although it says a lot about the scruples of the executives involved that the matter has become so urgent. After all, the big turning point in Joan Is Awful is when the protagonist realises that she could basically make the likeness of Salma Hayek defecate in a church without her permission, something that the flesh and blood Hayek took strongly against. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that, within the next decade, we could be watching the same thing happen to every actor on Earth. Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Dame Judi Dench, all of their likenesses plopping out turd after wet turd on to a sacred stone floor, just because the profit motives of a studio executive allowed ChatGPT to write a movie script. It goes without saying that, unless you have extremely niche interests, a film like this would be terrible. Let’s hope Sag-Aftra gets its way.