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This week’s episode of South Park opens with Santa Claus peeing in the face of a fourth-grade girl. It turns out to be an AI-generated video created by Butters as revenge against his former crush, Red, who cruelly manipulated him in a recent episode by pretending to like him in exchange for a rare Labubu doll. After learning of the video, Red decides to fight fire with fire, making her own AI footage of Butters molesting beloved Studio Ghibli character Totoro.
This kicks off a war of attrition among South Park Elementary’s student body, who use the Sora 2 OpenAI video generator – a real-life tool that allows users to create customised videos – to churn out videos of one another engaging in all manner of sexual and scatological behaviour with the likes of Popeye, Bluey and Droopy Dog (who poos in Kyle’s mouth). The adults of South Park can’t distinguish between AI and reality, so the town’s hapless police force think they have stumbled on a vast child sexual abuse ring.
As all this is happening, we catch up with Eric Cartman, last seen two episodes back being abducted by billionaire and antichrist expert Peter Thiel after undergoing some kind of demonic possession. Thiel’s plans for Cartman are still unclear, but in the meantime, he uses Sora 2 to throw Cartman’s worried mother off their trail, sending her AI videos of her son pretending to have a blast in the nation’s capital.
Also in Washington DC, President Trump has uncovered the still-murky plot between Thiel and JD Vance to kill his forthcoming love child with Satan. The diminutive Vance convinces his boss that he was only acting in his best interests before seducing him. The president and vice-president then engage in a sensual bout of lovemaking inside the White House’s Lincoln Bedroom. The use of Trump and Vance’s actual faces in the throes of orgasm make for some of the most disturbing visuals in this or any season. It is gut-bustlingly funny and stomach-churningly gross.
(The real Vance has tried to play the good sport about the show’s caricaturing him over the past few months, but it is doubtful that he’ll approve of this latest development.)
The episode’s threads converge when the South Park detectives trace one of the Cartman deepfakes to Thiel’s hide out. They arrest Thiel and rescue Cartman, who berates his mother about falling for the deepfakes. Searching Thiel’s laptop, the police uncover illegal surveillance footage from inside the White House of Trump and Vance’s sexual tryst. The public release of this footage initially causes the team at Fox News (who have been as constant a target this season as the president and his inner circle) to freak out, before Trump succeeds in convincing them, as well as a sceptical Satan, that the footage is – what else? – an AI fake.
It is only fitting that this episode, which features damning proof of Trump’s sexual misconduct and connections to widespread child sexual abuse in the world of South Park, would come out the same day that Congress released thousands of pages of documents from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, including several emails in which he states outright that Trump knew about “the girls” and had a lengthy engagement in the company of one of the victims. This wasn’t necessarily planned – South Park’s last-second production schedule is good, but it’s not that good.
Meanwhile, the latest episode, Sora Not Sorry, can be read as a mea culpa from series creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who have a personal stake in and history with its subject matter. In 2020, the duo founded Deep Voodoo LLC, a production studio powered by deepfake technology. So far, their output has been limited to one Kendrick Lamar music video and a series of web shorts released during the pandemic called Sassy Justice which revolved around a news reporter who bore a striking resemblance to none other than Donald Trump.
The first episode of this season of South Park – or last season, since Stone and Parker decided to split up this 10-episode run as part of a meta “six-seven” gag – ended with what many viewers thought was a fully AI-generated scene of a naked Trump wandering the desert. It turns out said scene was mostly real footage, with deepfake tech being applied only to the human actor’s face.
This has all come full circle now, as this episode not only condemns AI for degrading other people’s’ hard work (as one Studio Ghibli representative angrily proclaims: “[We] make Totoro with pencil and paint, not by typing sentence on stupid Sora app”), but also sounds the alarm for how this ever-evolving tech can and will be used to trick people into believing lies as well as denying the truth. Whether Parker and Stone act in accordance with their convictions and shutter Deep Voodoo remains to be seen.
As far as South Park goes, the pieces continue to fall into place for what promises to be a wild finale over the course of the remaining two episodes, although it will be as hard for them to top the horrific Trump-Vance sex scene as it will be for the rest of us to scrub it from our brains.
