22 Years Ago, South Park Predicted AI Slop

2 weeks ago 12

Butters talking to Awesom-O in South Park

Published May 11, 2026, 8:30 AM EDT

Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock.

Generative A.I. is easily the biggest existential threat facing the film and TV industry today. A few years ago, it was streaming and COVID, but they only threatened to close down movie theaters. If the theaters go out of business, it’ll be a travesty, but at least we’ll still get movies and TV shows; we’ll just have to watch them at home. If A.I. becomes normalized, then the whole thing is over. The artistry and humanity will be drained from the medium, and meaningful cinema will be replaced by disposable content.

Much like The Simpsons, South Park has always been ahead of the curve. It famously predicted Pokémon Go, legalized marijuana, and Miley Cyrus’ career trajectory. Ironically, in a roundabout way, it also predicted that money-grubbing Hollywood studios would jump at the chance to use a machine that generates movie ideas.

South Park's Iconic 2004 Episode "Awesom-O" Predicted Hollywood Studios Using AI To Make Movies

A Hollywood executive presenting Awesom-O in South Park

“Awesom-O” (season 8, episode 5) is one of South Park’s all-time best episodes. It sets up a juicy comic premise in its first act, and just rolls with it for the next half an hour. When Butters reveals that he has a humiliating video of Cartman, Cartman is forced to keep up the charade of his latest prank — pretending to be a robot named Awesom-O — so Butters won’t find out he tricked him and show the video to everyone in class.

Butters brings what he thinks is his new robot friend to visit his relatives in Los Angeles. There, Awesom-O is spotted by a couple of Hollywood studio executives, who wonder if he can be reprogrammed to come up with hit movies. So, they bring Cartman into their board room and ask him to generate a movie idea that’s guaranteed to break $100 million at the box office.

Cartman starts churning out dozens of derivative movie ideas cobbled together from existing tropes and plot formulas that he’s seen elsewhere, just like ChatGPT would if you gave it the same prompt. The diminishing returns of Awesom-O’s movie ideas highlight the problem with using A.I. for creativity. It doesn’t necessarily come up with good ideas; it just comes up with a lot of ideas.

Cartman Comes Up With Much Better Movie Ideas Than ChatGPT

While Cartman’s movie ideas aren’t exactly original, some of them actually sound pretty good. Almost all of them star Adam Sandler, the poster boy for dumb, fun high-concept comedies. Some of them are terrible, like a movie where Adam Sandler falls in love with a golden retriever, but some of them could turn out to be surprisingly watchable, like a movie where Adam Sandler is stranded on a desert island and falls in love with a coconut.

A movie where Adam Sandler is going to inherit $1 million, but first, he has to win a boxing match or something, is full of possibilities; it could cast Kevin James as his opponent, and Steve Buscemi or Henry Winkler as his trainer, and Chris Rock as a Don King-style boxing promoter. Even when South Park is deliberately trying to demonstrate a lack of creativity, it can’t help being a little creative — The Carrot sounds much better than the average Rob Schneider starring vehicle.