Considering Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s reputation for having their fingers on the pulse, it was only a matter of time before South Park satirically tackled the now-ubiquitous issue of artificial intelligence – but nobody could’ve anticipated they’d actually leverage the power of OpenAI’s ChatGPT to write the damn thing.
Entitled ‘Deep Learning,’ the fourth episode of season 26 (and 323rd overall episode) opens with Stan Marsh copping some heat for the lack of romance in his digital replies to girlfriend Wendy Testaburger. Apparently, lazy thumbs-ups don’t cut it anymore. That’s when his South Park Elementary classmate, Clyde Donovan, reveals he’s been scoring easy brownie points in this specific department with – you guessed it – ChatGPT.
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Before long, as per the South Park formula, the story spirals out of control. Heartfelt texts become school essays, and school essays lead to a shamanic “technician” with a falcon named Shadowbane hired to search out the cheater among them. Spoilers: it all culminates in Stan “saving the day” by asking ChatGPT to write a solution that takes the piss out of how predictable long-running shows such as this become over time; which is precisely how the entire third act was conceived in real life.
Of course, the involvement of ChatGPT hasn’t been kept a secret. On the contrary. Not only was it named in the credits, as you will have noticed in the feature image above, it’s officially listed as one of two writers responsible for South Park S26E04 (‘Deep Learning’). Right next to Trey Parker himself.
And here you were slick for using AI to write your uni assignments/work submissions.
