'South Park,' AI, and the Art of Staying Relevant

South Park’s 27th season proves that it's as incisive as ever

Randy and Towelie marveling at ChatGPT / Comedy Central

One of the most rewarding aspects of being a lifelong South Park fan is watching it remain fresh even as it forays into brave new waters. Back when it was first conceptualized in the early 1990s, almost no one could have predicted what it would ultimately become.

Many skeptics assumed that the show would run dry and lose viewers’ interest before reaching even a second season. Now with nearly 30 under its belt, and a contract set to see it all the way through to the end of season 32, the irreverent satire has endured more globalized change than almost any cartoon ever to air. But not only has South Park endured each of society’s tectonic shifts, it’s ridden the shockwaves and used our changing world as sustenance. Chaos gives it oxygen. The show draws its greatest reserve of fuel from fraught times.

Much of the reason South Park has been able to survive this long is because of the night-and-day reinvention it underwent in the early 2000s. As computer animation improved, creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker were no longer hamstrung by technological limitations and could channel more of their creative efforts into writing. They refined the cartoon’s tone and began setting its crosshairs more on the cultural issues of the time rather than crude jokes and gross-out gags. As a result, there’s a stark difference between the rudimentary cartoon that began regularly airing in 1997 and the one still dominating the political conversation today.

South Park is a show that relays our modern social history as effectively as any teacher, even if its framework is far more scabrous and cynical. By contrast, comparable cartoons like The Simpsons and Family Guy are products of their time, but they’re not so relentlessly up-to-date that they attempt to provide cultural critique on each historical new event as it occurs.

South Park has spent almost its entire life being made in the week-long lead-up to new episodes. Traditionally, they’ve aired on Wednesdays, and Thursdays would mark when the next episode would begin taking form. There have been times when operating under such constraints has resulted in the occasional dud or less thoughtful tackling of an issue. But over the past 20 years, there have been few controversies the animated titan has shied away from.

Ever since the pandemic and a series of high-profile disputes with streaming giants, South Park has been released to the public on a less predictable schedule, recently settling on an apparent every-other-week release calendar. But it’s no less present as a result. I suspect that the season 27 premiere created such a colossal splash that its writers have felt compelled to do what they can to retain their new audience. South Park’s producers have claimed that, “What they’re doing means this year’s episodes need more time than usual to put together, to finish,” according to Deadline.

As a result, each episode has the room to breathe and properly take shape rather than be aired in a less-than-satisfactory state. The attention these first few episodes have earned confirms that, whatever their strategy, it appears to be working — and at a time when so much else is failing.

It’s because South Park is so dutifully unwilling to remove its finger from the nation’s pulse that it’s never begun to feel stale after all of these years. Where so many other shows are walled in by the bulk of subjects they’ve already covered, South Park may remain relevant just so long as there’s news to cover and a world full of people and politicians worth satirizing. It’s why, at 27 seasons in, it shows no signs of slowing. If the reception of these past few episodes is any indicator, it’s only picking up steam — even at this late stage of its tenure on television. Its creators are more adept than ever at their craft, and 2025 has put as much material on their plate as they’ve had to work with since the onset of the pandemic.

With an incessant barrage of developments coming out of our current White House, censorship concerns mounting across the country, and artificial intelligence rapidly burgeoning in the background, our accelerating world has left no shortage of subjects worth addressing and pulling humor from. The topics that this season is centered around are ones that might not seem at face value like fertile grounds for comedy. But it’s for precisely that reason that it serves as such a potent proof of the value that satire can supply in troubled times.

As in recent seasons, there’s been a serialized component to the episodes of season 27; jokes and events of one episode bleed into the next. Each episode following the pilot has continued its trend of depicting the President of the United States as a poorly endowed Middle Eastern dictator. But the focal aim of episode 3, titled “Sickofancy,” is on the relationship that many of us have begun developing with AI chat bots.

Season 26 explored the initial advent of large language models like ChatGPT, as well as the importance of blue-collar jobs in an increasingly incompetent, AI-addled world. And just as the once-backwoods town of South Park has transitioned from a cellphone-free society to one with three-camera’d iPhones, we now get to watch its relationship with artificial intelligence develop in ways that riotously mirror our own.

Everyone in the town, from Randy and his conscious towel companion, Towelie, to the devil himself, are turning to the ChatGPT-5 voice assistant for advice. And in familiar fashion, it sycophantically listens and offers chipper counsel to users regardless of how riotous, impossible, or immoral the input.

As someone who regularly converses with ChatGPT myself, I could hardly restrain my laughter at just how accurate this portrayal was, and how close I’ve finally come to my dream of being satirized by Stone and Parker.

So much of the magic of South Park is in the way that it’s turned adaptability into an art form. Other cartoons calcify with age, rehashing the same characters and jokes until they become relics of their original eras. But the long-running show has maintained its keen eye for current events, metabolizing each breaking news update and spitting it back out through its lovably warped lens.

The 2020s have proven that as time goes on, South Park is still capable of commanding our cultural conversation — no matter how strange the discourse gets.

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