What you need to know
- South Park is a topical adult satirical cartoon known for its aggressive and often controversial satirization of life in the United States.
- The show has become increasingly current in recent years, and the latest episode is casting its gaze over Microsoft's and OpenAI's ChatGPT platform.
- In a clip shared by Comedy Central, the boys of South Park seem to be using ChatGPT to help their dating prospects.
Prolific and popular U.S. satire show South Park is getting on the ChatGPT train tomorrow, airing on March 8 and 10PM ET on Comedy Central.
Set in the fictional town of South Park, Colorado, the show typically lampoons recent events and current affairs through the lens of four elementary school boys. The show has been notorious for courting controversy, and this next episode is likely to be no different.
Stan asks Clyde for dating advice, in an all-new episode of South Park, titled “Deep Learning” premiering Wednesday, March 8, at 10:00p ET/PT on Comedy Central pic.twitter.com/2kQcGux9EmMarch 6, 2023
In the clip shared above, Stan asks Clyde for dating advice, noting that he always seems to say the wrong thing to his girlfriend. Clyde responds by saying he uses ChatGPT language AI to generate text replies to his girlfriend. Ooooh boy.
For those who may be unaware, ChatGPT is an AI language model powered by machine learning, and trained on the web. Microsoft has exclusive rights to commercial applications of the tech, owing to billions of dollars of investment in the firm, perhaps ironically called "OpenAI," given that the tech is very much not open. Most recently, Microsoft began integrating ChatGPT replies into Bing search queries, with ChatGPT shortcuts in Windows 11 itself.
In any case, there are any number of directions co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker could take the new South Park episode in. I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually find out they used ChatGPT to write the script.
South Park has featured Microsoft a few times before in its shows. The hilarious console wars episodes featured former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates himself going to war for the Xbox One. Gates even has former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer killed in the episodes for not being competitive enough, before engaging in hand to hand combat with Sony's former president Kaz Hirai.
Current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has yet to feature in South Park, but perhaps tomorrow's episode will feature his debut.
