South Park has taken on ChatGPT and added a little social commentary about the rise of generative AI and the growing influence of large tech companies. The show has some laughs and cringe-worthy content, as usual. However, I always take note when new technologies show up in cultural leaders such as South Park and Saturday Night Live in the U.S.
This is significant for multiple reasons. First, the technology is clearly impactful enough that South Park co-creator Trey Parker created a full episode revolving around ChatGPT. He also listed ChatGPT as the co-writer for the episode.
Second, Parker must have thought there were enough people already aware of ChatGPT that the jokes would make sense. At the same time, South Park’s focus on the generative AI large language model (LLM) surely raised further awareness and interest.
Saturday Night Live and South Park gave similar treatment to Amazon Alexa and the smart speaker category in 2018 and 2021, respectively. SNL helped fuel popular interest in the new product category. South Park poked fun both at what voice assistants had become and what people thought about what they had become.
South Park gets laughs by putting a mirror on society and cultural trends that highlight their inconsistencies, absurdities, shortcomings, and bad outcomes. Saturday Night Live shows what is funny about what is fashionable. So, it was surprising to see South Park take the lead in entertainment with ChatGPT satire. It suggests that generative AI is setting down roots in our cultural icons.
A key social commentary that the episode forwards is the threat that a helpful tool will first create inauthentic interactions between humans and then create conflict as we outsource to machines our communication with other humans. A second commentary is that tech giants control these tools, and it is so powerful individuals should have control over it. The South Park character Stan said:
“Look everyone. We can’t blame people that are using ChatGPT, it’s not their fault…I’ll tell you [whose fault it is]. It’s the giant tech companies who took OpenAI, packaged it, monetized it, and pushed it out to all of us as fast as they could in order to get ahead. OpenAI is so powerful, that it has to be something that everyone can use, control, and contribute to or else AI will be controlled by corporations that just want an unfair advantage like Cartman does.”
Of course, the statement was generated by ChatGPT. So, we get a taste of good old-fashioned irony. The only way to save Stan’s girlfriend from going to jail and to lift the chaos for everyone was to use ChaGPT to make right the things it had undermined in the first place.
Play.ht was another generative AI technology that showed up in the credits. “Special thanks for Play.ht for AI voices.” Synthedia has learned that Play.ht was used as the voice of ChatGPT.
It is unclear whether the relationship will go beyond this need to provide a voice for the AI model in this episode. However, now that synthetic voices and voice clones are on the radar of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, you can imagine that as an anchor concept for an episode. Cartman could use it to impersonate his friends over the phone and create chaos, while another character could try to use voice authentication to get money from his parent’s bank account. You heard it here first, folks. 😀😀
Generative AI has already had a Pokemon Go moment. It went from a low simmer to a rolling boil in a few days in December and early January. Deepfakes have had more gradual exposure to consumers, and much of it was negative. However, deepfakes had their positive momentum amplified when Metaphysic showed up on America’s Got Talent last year.
You may be wondering what that moment will be for LLMs. This time it’s different. LLM text generators had their moment on social media, on YouTube, at dinner parties, and in personal conversations. It was an emergent phenomenon that didn’t need a cultural icon to introduce it into popular culture. It showed up everywhere at once because of the positive individual experiences with ChatGPT that people felt compelled to share. That meant the shapers of culture could move right on to satire.
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