Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have graphic sex (in South Park) | South Park

TThis week’s episode of South Park begins with Santa Claus urinating in the face of a fourth-grade girl. It turns out to be an AI-generated video created by Butters as revenge against his ex-lover, Red, who cruelly manipulated him in a recent episode by pretending to like him in exchange for a rare Lapopo doll. After learning of the video, Reid decided to fight fire with fire, creating her own AI footage of Butters harassing Studio Ghibli’s beloved Totoro character.

This sets off a war of attrition between the student body at South Park Elementary, who use the Sora 2 OpenAI video generator — a real-life tool that allows users to create personalized videos — to produce videos of each other engaging in all sorts of sexual and dirty behavior with the likes of Popeye, Bluey, and Droopy Dog (who defecates in Kyle’s mouth). The adults of South Park can’t tell the difference between artificial intelligence and reality, so the city’s down-on-his-luck police force believes they’ve stumbled upon a large-scale pedophilia ring.

While all this is going on, we catch up with Eric Cartman, who we’ve seen the last two episodes after being kidnapped by billionaire and Antichrist expert Peter Thiel after undergoing some sort of demonic possession. Thel’s plans for Cartman remain unclear, but in the meantime, he uses Sora 2 to get Cartman’s worried mother out of their way, sending her AI videos of her son pretending to be exposed to an explosion in the nation’s capital.

Also in Washington, D.C., Donald Trump revealed a still-mysterious plot between Thiel and J.D. Vance to kill his would-be child with the devil. The diminutive Vance convinces his boss that he was only acting in his own best interest before seducing him. The President and Vice President then engage in a sensual bout of love-making inside the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House. The use of Trump and Vance’s actual faces in the throes of orgasm makes for some of the most disturbing images of this or any season. It’s uproariously funny and stomach-churning.

(The real Vance has tried to play good about his caricature over the past few months, but it’s doubtful he’ll approve of this latest development.)

The episode’s threads converge when South Park detectives track one of Cartman’s deepfake to Thel’s hideout. They arrest Thel and rescue Cartman, who berates his mother for falling in love with the deepfake. While searching Thiel’s laptop, police discovered illegal surveillance footage from inside the White House of Trump and Vance’s sexual encounter. The public release of this footage initially spooked the Fox News team (which has been a constant target this season as have the president and his inner circle), before Trump succeeded in convincing them, as well as the skeptical Devil, that the footage was — what else? – Fake AI.

It is fitting that this episode, which contains damning evidence of Trump’s sexual misconduct and connections to widespread child sexual abuse in the South Park universe, comes on the same day that Congress released thousands of pages of documents from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, including several emails in which he explicitly stated that Trump knew about the “girls” and had a long-term relationship with one of the victims. This wasn’t necessarily planned, the last-second production schedule for South Park is fine, but it’s not Which good.

Meanwhile, the final episode, Sora Not Sorry, can be read as an admission of guilt from series creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who have a personal stake in the series’ subject matter and history. In 2020, the duo founded Deep Voodoo LLC, a production studio powered by deepfake technology. So far, their output has been limited to one Kendrick Lamar music video and a series of web shorts released during the pandemic called Sassy Justice about a news reporter who bears a striking resemblance to none other than Donald Trump.

The first episode of this season of South Park — or last season, since Stone and Parker decided to split up these 10 episodes as part of a “six and seven” gag — ended with what many viewers thought was an entirely AI-generated scene of a naked Trump wandering through the desert. It turns out that the scene in question was mostly real footage, with the deepfake technology only applied to the human actor’s face.

It’s all come full circle now, as this episode doesn’t just condemn AI for belittling the hard work of others (as one Studio Ghibli representative angrily declares: “[We] “Create Totoro with pencil and paint, not by typing a sentence on Sora’s stupid app”), but it also raises the alarm about how this ever-evolving technology is being used to trick people into believing lies as well as denying the truth. It remains to be seen whether Parker and Stone act on their convictions and shut down Deep Voodoo.

As far as South Park goes, the pieces continue to fall into place for what promises to be a wild finale over the course of the remaining two episodes, though it’ll be as hard for them to top the horrific Trump-Vance sex scene as the rest of us will have to scrub it from our brains.