‘South Park’ Is at the Forefront of the Latest A.I. Controversy

I have some good news for South Park fans who are growing impatient with the show’s wildly infrequent schedule: Now you can just make your own South Park episode any time you want, the only caveat being that it will be completely soulless, legally dubious and environmentally catastrophic. 

As explained by The Hollywood Reporter recently, the newest version of OpenAI’s video generator Sora “allows users to create content featuring intellectual property owned by studios across Hollywood.” This includes popular franchises such as Dune, Rick and Morty and South Park.

Right now social media is chock-full of user-generated South Park mini-episodes in which, say, Cartman gets a self-driving car to take him to Casa Bonita. Try not to hurt yourself laughing at this work of comedic brilliance:

Or here’s “South Park’s” scintillating take on the recent government shutdown:

Then there’s this “almost perfect” scene in which Cartman and Kyle discuss the recent controversy around Tylenol:

While OpenAI is supposed to block actors’ likenesses from videos, they company is apparently weirdly chill about this blatant intellectual property violation. The Hollywood Reporter noted that copyright owners actually have to “opt out of having their content appear,” which is a highly “cavalier approach” that could lead to “a legal battle between Hollywood’s biggest studios and the A.I. start-up.”

While the A.I.-generated South Park videos may not be of the highest quality from a writing perspective, they do look and sound just like Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s characters. But this accuracy then suggests that Sora 2 was trained on copyrighted material (OpenAI has merely stated that it was trained on “diverse datasets”).

Legal experts who spoke to the outlet claimed that “studios and production companies have grounds to sue” the tech company since this arrangement is “really contrary to what copyright is meant to protect.” 

While Parker and Stone do own their own A.I. deepfake company, Deep Voodoo, South Park has been fairly critical of A.I. as of late, most recently in the episode “Sickofancy,” in which Randy keeps turning to the overly-flattering ChatGPT for major life decisions.

And before that, the Season 26 episode “Deep Learning” similarly covered ChatGPT, and illustrated how A.I. technology enables laziness. And it literally ends with a parody of hacky, A.I.-generated South Park storylines. 

Whether or not Parker and Stone will address the fact that a text-to-video A.I. company has been ripping them off in the show itself remains to be seen. And if they don’t, well, any rando can just make their own terrible version of that storyline anyway.