Warning: Spoilers ahead for South Park season 26, episode 4.While South Park season 26 has made fun of numerous hot-button issues, episode 4’s ChatGPT satire used the subject of AI to take aim at the show's own writing process. South Park has offended many viewers over the years, but the show has always been able to defend its scatological satire. South Park’s creators famously argue that the series is an “equal opportunity offender,” and that mocking every religion, social and cultural movement, or news event means that no one demographic can complain about their depiction in the series. The efficacy of this approach is up for debate, but the creators of South Park do readily apply it to their own show.
Since the show’s earliest episodes, South Park has made fun of itself. From the feature-length theatrical South Park movie mocking the show’s choppy, cheap animation to a season 26 episode making light of its outdated, almost irrelevant satire, South Park has always been able to turn its satirical point inwards. This approach proved particularly effective in South Park season 26, episode 4, “Deep Learning.” In this outing, Stan used ChatGPT’s open-source AI technology to respond to his girlfriend’s texts while his classmates used the tech to write their essays, thus starting a story that ended with South Park mocking its predictable writing.
Stan’s AI-Generated South Park Plot Sounded Familiar
After Stan, Butters, Clyde, and Cartman used ChatGPT to write their essays and reply to their girlfriends, the boys ran into trouble when AI-generated text was detected on the phone of Stan’s girlfriend, Wendy. Like the wild character shift Butters went through in South Park season 26, this story soon arrived at a suspiciously neat conclusion. Stan found a clever answer to this issue, and the series mocked South Park’s own writing in the process. When Stan used ChatGPT to end the episode’s story, the resulting scene sounded very familiar since the sequence that was supposedly written by AI sounded like a lazy episode of South Park.
From Cartman’s insults to Stan’s impassioned ending speech to Mr. Mackey’s long-forgotten catchphrase, the final scenes of “Deep Learning” leaned into tropes that South Park has used ad nauseam. To be fair, the sequence was still clever, with South Park’s hero noting that AI is mostly owned by a handful of major Big Tech companies. Stan advocated for open source availability of this technology, refusing to demonize the technology itself and instead placing blame on the monopolizing corporations for hoarding it. However, much like South Park season 26 episode 2, the outing still ended with Stan speaking directly to the audience while supporting characters spouted comic relief one-liners, as usual.
South Park Mocked The Show’s Familiar Formula
The South Park episode’s closing sequence was intentionally far too tidy and the scene ended the story way too slickly. However, this worked in the context of an episode about the boys (and their teacher) dodging the real work of relationships, teaching, and academia alike. When Mr. Garrison noted that there was no reason to fear AI-generated movies since Hollywood is already derivative and repetitive, this was another instance of South Park season 26 leaning into pretty blatant meta-humor. Ever since the season premiere avoided reviving South Park’s famous Kanye West spoof, the series has been attempting to sidestep obvious, crowd-pleasing stories in favor of something more original and thoughtful.
South Park Season 26 Proves The Show’s Experiments Aren’t Bad
To be fair to the creators of South Park, from Randy’s increasingly major role to season-long experiments with serialization, to feature-length specials, the show has reinvented itself a few times in the last few years. However, not all of these experiments have been successful, so it made sense for South Park season 26 to remind viewers that they don't really want auto-generated, ultra-formulaic episodes. This was also the second time in two episodes that South Park has taken a definitive stance on an issue instead of the show’s “any stance is bad” status quo and, like South Park’s weird toilet paper storyline, the plot was surprisingly effective because of this.
South Park’s experimental outings have occasionally been ambitious failures but, at their best, these episodes prove that the show’s creators still want the series to feel fresh. By envisioning an AI-generated South Park episode and filling it with catchphrases and overly familiar gags, the ending of “Deep Learning” made it clear that the satirical series can do better than this. It takes some creative risks and can be hard to pull off, but South Park season 26 can still surprise viewers even after 25 years on the air — provided, as the show noted, the series holds onto its human touch.