ChatGPT artificial intelligence co-authored an episode of South Park

The creators of the cult animated series South Park have engaged ChatGPT chatbot to write a script for one of the episodes of the 26th season. Thus, in the fourth episode titled «Deep Learning», students of South Park Elementary learn about the latest technologies that can be used to write homework and love messages. Although many viewers took the presence of a chatbot in the credits as sarcasm, ChatGPT was most likely a co-creator of the series.

The fourth episode of the 26th season shows how several boys from Stan’s class (one of the main and regular characters of the cartoon) use a chatbot to write homework and send text messages to their girlfriends. In the end, the AI not only writes all the messages for the boys, but also generates a story about Stan, who went to school and used ChatGPT.

The episode also contains a slight hint of the activities of large corporations that, in the pursuit of money, encourage people to rely only on AI rather than on their own strength. The series calls for sincerity in relationships, honesty in education and work.

The moral at the end of the episode is in line with the spirit of the entire series: Stan says that all the world’s troubles are not the fault of people using neural networks, but of giant tech corporations that have monetized the technology and distributed it to users.

It should be noted that the creators of South Park Trey Parker and Matt Stone have a joint artificial intelligence startup called Deep Voodoo studio. The project recently raised $ 20 million in funding. At the beginning of 2020, Deep Voodoo started developing its own deepfake technology. In May 2022, the startup team created special effects for the video of American rapper Kendrick Lamar.