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We’re going down to South Park, gonna have ourselves A.I. time… And as it turns out, it’s going to be a way worse time than you might imagine.

The long-running animated sitcom, created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, recently found itself as the center of attention of the Emmy Award-winning production company Fable Studios, which has started work on a new project called The Simulation. The project allows users to generate unauthorized episodes of TV shows with original stars and premises through a program called Showrunner AI. The raunchy animated show serves as the source material for nine of the company’s latest projects.

The company has also created an animated episode of the television show Friends, and regularly hosts spaces for virtual beings to connect. 

The recent headline-grabbing venture for the company is part of their collaboration with the news outlet AXIOS. Chief technology correspondent Ina Field asked the studio to create an episode about an AI program that wants to take control of South Park from its creators. The final product stars Field and has a runtime of five minutes. 

As expected, the script for the faux-South Park episode feels stilted and unnatural, and none of the jokes stick the landing. Nonetheless, AXIOS called the episode “a plausible and occasionally clever vignette” and included quotes from Edward Saatchi, who runs the creative studio behind the program, about how he sides with the creators about limiting the usage of AI but ultimately wants to see the company transform television and movies into an everyman industry. The fanfiction-ification of the medium, I suppose… if fanfiction was created by robots?

As Eric Cartman would say: “Screw you guys, I’m going home!” 

While the specific program is new, this isn’t the first time artificial intelligence has created a version of a television program, and it likely won’t be the last. In February, a never-ending parody of Seinfeld generated by two people using OpenAI’s GPT-3 went viral, attracting over 171,000 followers on Twitch before being banned from the platform a few days later after featuring a series of transphobic jokes.

During the height of this trend, South Park and its fans rallied against artificial intelligence as a form of creation. The latest season included an episode titled “Deep Learning,” in which the famed characters found themselves in trouble once their school discovered that students have been using artificial intelligence to do their assignments – and communicate with each other. The episode received a mixed reception and sparked controversy after it was revealed that it was co-written by the artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT. Can you thoroughly critique something while also insinuating its usefulness? And is South Park as subversive and smart as it considers itself to be?

Circling back to the South Park simulation, which involved no contribution from Parker and Stone, the internet has lit up, particularly in light of the current Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Christos Gage, Daredevil and Hawaii Five-0 writer, called the simulation “soulless and unfunny,” and said that it painted an unfair scenario where a studio would give the scene to the writer with directions to “fix it.” They fear that the writer would then be underpaid given the lack of protections that artists have against artificial intelligence works, and the willingness that studios and streamers have already demonstrated towards using the technology nefariously. 

Another told the company they were going “straight to hell,” writing, “Not only [are you] making AI reconstructions of IPs you don’t own and replacing the entire crew with no permission, but you’re going [sic] it during the first writer/actor strike since 1960.”

Just last week, it was revealed that amid negotiations between SAG-AFTRA and AMPTP, the trade associations proposed background performers be scanned and paid for one day’s work, allowing companies to own their scan for the rest of eternity with no additional compensation.

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Decider reached out to South Park representatives for comment but did not hear back by the time of publication.

It seems as though the ball is in Fable Studios’ court. They can’t advocate for controlled usage of the technology while also shapeshifting the creation of hundreds of people’s hard work into something for their own benefit — especially while the creators are on strike and out of work in part because of Fable Studios’ very line of work. It’s not even a double-edged sword like the legitimate South Park episode… It’s just a regular sword.