Who needs television writers when you have artificial intelligence? South Park, apparently.
The writing room at South Park HQ chose to get some help for the show's most recent episode, called 'Deep Learning'.
Headline-making AI bot ChatGPT was listed as one of the two writers responsible for the episode, right next to the big cheese himself, Trey Parker.
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'Deep Learning' begins with the students at South Park Elementary discovering they can get ChatGPT to do their homework and school assignments for them.
That's what we call art reflecting life, right there.
Eventually, the male students decide to wield the power of AI for an alternate purpose: to talk to girls.
In one scene, Clyde explains the software to Stan when he asks what the hell ChatGPT actually is.
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"Yeah, dude, there’s a bunch of apps and programs you can subscribe to that use OpenAI to do all of your writing for you," Clyde said.
"People use them to write poems, write job applications, but what they’re really good for is dealing with chicks."
Naturally, Stan, Butters, Clyde, and Cartman go on to use ChatGPT to write essays and messages to their girlfriends.
The lads soon hit a rough patch, however, when the girls at school install an app to alert them to messages that have been written by AI software.
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Game, set, match, boys.
These sorts of programs are a thing in real life, with GPTZero available to those who need to know when AI has been used.
So, people like teachers and university professors and the like.
OpenAI even programmed its own software to spot AI-generated writing, but admittedly none of these detection tools work as well as the fictional app in South Park.
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But, we digress. Back to the episode.
The boys then go on to experience the classic TV mix-up. Loving texts 'from the heart' become school essays.
Those essays lead to a technician being hired to search out the cheater among them.
Technician is a strong word. Basically, he's a shamanic cheater-hunter with a falcon named Shadowbane.
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Anyway, aside from the introduction of that super cool sounding dude, here's what happens at the end.
So spoiler alert from here on in.
The episode sees Stan save the day by asking ChatGPT to write a solution that pokes fun at predictable, long-running TV shows (for example, South Park) and how they come up with new content.
Which is exactly how the entire third act of the episode was conceived in real life.
How meta indeed.
Topics: South Park, Film and TV, Entertainment, Technology
Rachel Lang