It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally South Park will have some unintended casualties in their topical and often controversial episodes. That happened this week. And I was in the group of those spotlighted.

The show was meant to be a cautionary on ChatGPT, the latest advancement in open ended artificial intelligence. Our story begins with some of the children at South Park elementary turning in these highly complicated and detailed essays on world events. The leaps in learning go undetected by Mr. Garrison at first.

Then Clyde starts using ChatGPT to send these ultra romantic text messages to Bebe. Bebe then becomes the envy of all of the other girls in her circle, including Wendy, who’s been dating Stan for like 25 years now.

And then the problems start. You see. Stan is like many of us guys. A minimalist texter. We don’t say much and use the “thumbs up” button a lot.

Wendy, and the rest of the girls begin to frown on this behavior as ChatGPT begins to take over the town’s writing.

A simple thumbs up is seen as insensitive and disconnected. Its not long before Stan starts using ChatGPT as well. And then the whole town starts getting suspicious.

Ultimately, everything is brought to light and we learn that this kind of technology should be used to compliment our writing. Not replace it. Its actually a pretty funny episode.

But alas, the damage has been done. While the ending does smile on a thumbs up reply, the long term effects of the show will frown on the use of the simple response.

If you’re a minimalist texter like me, be advised. South Park and every HBO Max subscriber is on to us.

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