South Park S28 Ep 3 Review
When ChatGPT started making waves a few years ago, I promised myself I would never use AI to do things that I could do myself, including writing. Fast-forward to the present day, and now we have even more prompt-based AI apps, like Sora 2. Thanks to them, people are able to make videos about any subject or involving anyone they want doing anything they want, no matter how disgusting it might be. And that is a big problem, not just for creative types like myself, but for everyone. Because when something like Sora 2 can create such a convincing fake, then how will we know when the truth is in front of us? Case in point, we just got an entire episode of South Park highlighting how Sora can manipulate people who aren’t on the up and up.
And I loved every minute of it.
Karma Stinks, Huh, Red and Butters?
So, remember how Red manipulated Butters into being her boyfriend a few episodes ago so she could get a rare Labubu as a birthday present? Well, Butters has decided to get payback in the worst way possible using Sora 2. Using the text-prompting app, he creates what Kyle outright calls “revenge p***” to humiliate Red, and it goes viral across the school. How does Red respond to this? By retaliating with her own video of Butters having *** with Totoro.
Again, this was all thanks to Sora 2. And the people of South Park are stupid enough to fall for it.
If you will recall, this isn’t the first time that South Park has pointed out the problem with using AI to get out of doing work. They made an episode a few years ago showing how ChatGPT could be misused. However, Sora 2 is even worse than what ChatGPT does. Give it the right prompt, and it could make a fake video so convincing that it could fool millions of people, maybe even billions. That has plenty of content creators, people who do this stuff for a living, worried for their future. Heck, I’m one of those people. I’ve been trying to earn money by writing for years, and things like ChatGPT and Sora 2 could make that impossible. Needless to say, I was overjoyed to see South Park satirizing its usage.
Stop Messing With Kids Characters, Sora Users
To highlight just how easy it could be to fool people with Sora 2, the conflict between Red and Butters gets the police involved. Since Detective Harrison’s an idiot, though, he’s convinced kids are being m****** by these fictional characters. To be fair, though, it’s been established that there’s a separate dimension that’s home to everything humanity’s ever imagined, so their existence isn’t infeasible. Eventually, the whole thing spirals to the point there are graphic videos of a bunch of kids with cartoon characters, making Butters fess up. But he also reveals that he only got the idea because he saw the fake videos he thought were being put out by Cartman, when it was really Peter Thiel.
It seems that Matt and Trey decided that whatever they planned to do with Cartman stopping the antichrist fell through, or they got bored of the 6-7 thing. So they just had the cops arrest Thiel and Cartman head home. However, they then find something shocking when they see surveillance footage of the President and Vice President literally in bed together.
In the ongoing plot with the White House, the President is not happy with his VP to kill his and Satan’s unborn child. Not because he cares, but because it will make him look bad to his supporters. Somehow, one thing leads to another between the two, and the next thing we know, we find the two in bed with each other in all its horrible glory. Not only is the President cheating on his wife, but he’s even cheating on Satan now! Naturally, Fox News is aghast to hear this…until the President tells them it was all made up using Sora 2.
Sora 2 is a Menace to Creators
The message that South Park is giving us is loud and clear: if we keep abusing AI like Sora to make content, then there may come a point where we can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t. That is a terrifying prospect! Yet, at the same time, I couldn’t help but laugh my butt off at the whole thing. This is the kind of stupidity that South Park loves to make fun of, and it’s the kind of thing that I think needs to have more attention brought to it. Especially since the very day after this episode aired, Disney announced they were going to let users make ai-content of their stuff on Disney+. I’ve already seen Dana Terrace encouraging fans to just pirate The Owl House on Twitter while saying ‘F Gen AI.” And I completely understand that feeling.
AI like Sora may seem like fun and games, but by abusing its power like this, we get Butters having *** with Totoro and Kyle getting **** upon by Droopy Dog. Do we really want to use it to ruin our childhoods like that?Because that is where South Park thinks we are heading, and I don’t like that!
All that aside, though, I thought this was a very strong episode. The strongest the show has been since it started the year bashing the President, even. Hopefully, these last two episodes will stick the landing, and maybe give us Thanksgiving and Christmas episodes in the process. Until then, please don’t resort to Sora!
