This episode contains spoilers for “South Park” season 28, episode 3, “Sora Not Sorry”.
If there’s been a recurring theme throughout this season of “South Park,” it’s being at the behest of a world we no longer recognize. The surprise season 28 premiere saw Jesus (Matt Stone) being worn down by what it means to be a Christian in the age of MAGA, while the following Halloween episode saw Stan (Trey Parker) resorting to crypto schemes because, in his words, South Park sucks now. Last night’s episode, “Sora Not Sorry,” unsurprisingly takes aim at yet another technological scourge contributing to the rise of misinformation. It even starts out like you’re about to see a brand new episode of “South Park,” with Red (Mona Marshall) going door to door to get people to sign her petition. Things seem immediately off once she says it’s in service of getting people to smell her farts. And then, from out of nowhere, comes Santa (Parker) saying he’s literally going to pee in her face. The start of the episode was, in reality, a horrifying AI deepfake video made by Butters (Stone) using OpenAI’s Sora 2 generative model as a form of revenge.
Kyle (Stone) and Stan act as the voices of reason here, as they’re both disheartened by what they’re seeing. The video is circulated throughout the school, which understandably makes Red upset. But instead of reporting it, she decides to retaliate by interrupting a school assembly with a video that shows Butters having sex with Totoro from “My Neighbor Totoro.” What follows is yet another hilarious critique on how this deranged platform plagiarizes intellectual property to do the most heinous things.
Sora 2 is put under the South Park microscope with deepfakes of branded characters doing obscene acts
About halfway through “Sora Not Sorry,” there’s a moment where Kyle takes Butters to call a truce with Red after the AI wars start to get out of control. Kenny (Stone) gets his own AI-generated video in which he’s sexually assaulted by Popeye the Sailor Man, which is blessedly played offscreen. You can tell the “AI-generated” videos aren’t actually the result of using Sora 2 because even the non-punchlines within them are still punchlines in and of themselves. But much like the opening, Kyle starts saying things he would never utter, only to have Droopy Dog from the beloved Tex Avery cartoons poop in his mouth. It gets to the point where there’s a whole epidemic of AI deepfakes that weaponize branded characters like poor innocent Bluey to “go to the bathroom in a very, very bad place” and not get paid for it.
Everything Stone and Parker touch upon in this episode has some basis in reality. The angry representatives of Studio Ghibli (Parker) being upset at Butters for defiling what is ostensibly their Mickey Mouse is no doubt a commentary on Hayao Miyazaki’s notorious disdain for artificially generated imagery. OpenAI’s new image generator is also making it easier to plagiarize Ghibli’s hand-crafted animation (via Forbes). Just to show how quickly the world makes advancements in terrible decisions, less than 12 hours after last night’s episode aired, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced that Disney+ users will soon be able to make their own short form AI-generated content (via The Hollywood Reporter). Nothing demonstrates the company’s adherence to upholding imagination more than charging people to desecrate their artists’ hard work on their own platform!
The line between artificially-generated images and reality is a thin one in South Park
You would think all the branded mascots pooping and peeing on the “South Park” characters was just an example of Stone and Parker’s notorious affinity for toilet humor. But it can’t help but come across as a thinly veiled reference to an AI-generated video that President Donald J. Trump posted on his Truth Social account last month of himself offloading copious amounts of poop onto people attending the No Kings protest. Trump (Stone) also comes back into play this week as the B-plot of “Sora Not Sorry” further builds upon the Satan butt baby saga with a critical development between him and lil JD Vance (Parker). A video circulates of them getting intimate in the Lincoln bedroom, but the sycophants at Fox News celebrate when he tells them it’s just AI. There’s not enough bleach in the world to make me unsee that.
Cartman (Parker) may have been rescued from Peter Thiel (Stone), yet he’s upset at his mom and just about everyone else believing the easily identifiable Sora 2-generated videos of him. The little menace of “South Park” only gets found because Butters takes responsibility for making Red’s video in the first place, which leads police to their hotel room. One of the ultimate lessons here is that these kinds of digital trickery are still incredibly transparent. Parker and Stone give you a taste of how they see apps like Sora 2 not only debasing the show and their material, but flat-out ruining lives with rampant misinformation. It doesn’t surprise me that people who can’t create art themselves believe this janky-looking AI garbage is the way of the future.
Every episode of “South Park” is currently streaming on Paramount+.
