South Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone deepfake Trump for new web series, Sassy Justice
Aux Features Sassy Justice
Deepfakes are a scourge on our increasingly online culture, but perhaps the best way to ensure they don’t accidentally trigger a nuclear war is to raise awareness via absurd demonstrations of the face-swapping technology. We’ve seen movie scenes, sitcom credits, and presidential speeches reimagined, but we’ve yet to see an entire series built around deepfakes. Until now.
South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone have teamed with British comedian and actor Peter Serafinowicz for Sassy Justice, a web series in which sassy Cheyenne reporter Fred Sassy (deepfaked with Trump’s mug) investigates local stories, the first of which is, fittingly, the danger posed by deepfakes. Al Gore, Michael Caine, and Jared Kushner, each played by actors convincingly deepfaked to resemble the real figures, lend expertise throughout the 15-minute episode, which comes punctuated with commercials in which a Faux-Zuckerberg shills sham dialysis treatments.
Watch individual segments and subscribe to the Sassy Justice channel over on YouTube or, if you’re feeling nostalgic, revisit what’s perhaps the sassiest TV show of them all below.
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113 Comments
I wonder how the people who blame South Park for increased voter apathy account for the massive early turnout.
Donald Trump. Haven’t you been paying attention?
Even South Park pulled a mea culpa with the Pandemic Special, outright begging people to vote this year.
They had Trump/Garrison outright beg people not to vote for him 4 years ago.EDIT: Contrary to what Laserface said, the episode aired 13 days before the election.
And it came out the night of the election or a few days after. They only begged people to vote against him at the last minute. So it’s not like it did anything, the election was already over.But nonsensical arguments from Dino Ironbody: The Defender of Blackface and TERFs is to be expected.
Look, if this is the way you wanna do things, you can do it over on the editorial page of the Village Voice.
Fuck, those links were a rollercoaster.
Laserface, that thing that you are doing is a not good thing which is a bit bad.Post history is a bit important to get where somebody is talking from, and to give context and underlying meaning to individual statements. But that’s not what you’re doing. You’re mischaracterizing individual posts which themselves would require history for their potential ill-intent or toxicity to be demonstrated. In fact, you are stigmatizing any deviating nuance as some foaming evil agenda. That is a very uninteresting thing to do and not very honest. It’s also counter-productive : you make a strong claim on a person, and back it up with links that, when checked, deflate it. As if you had never met truly evil militants on the internet, people who actually warrant such warnings.This is not how discussions should or can go. This is not how the complexities and dilemmas of the world should be explored. It is dangerous, because it’s an exclusion of (self-)questioning, of handrails, of acknowledgement of complex, multi-layered, multi-stakes, contradictory issues. It’s like you cleanse them of all the “yet but” they require. It’s not healthy, whichever your side.Also personally, because I’m a “yes but” person, because I find good reasons to disagree with each one of my opinions (or at least to “border” them), because I think it’s important to nuance and complexify any statement or belief, I’m certain you can already build the files of my monstrosity. Either that, or you’ve got the tools to support double standards.I’m saying this because I already saw you do it (with a person whose view I disagree with, but who wasn’t backing them with inane evil troll logic), and I don’t think it’s fair. I think it’s fair in contexts where much worse people hang around and test the boundaries of expressions of truly nauseating views. You’d have a lot of work in nazi-infested gaming forums à la gog.com. But it seems overzealous and intolerant here.So this is a honest heads up because I generally like your posts (despite the brain-scorching lunacy of the obscure comic pages you sadistically unleash upon us). And I generally agree with your positions. But this nags me, and sorry, I have’t found any PM system to discuss it backstage.
I wish they’d put a limit on these
Word on the street is you’re into blackface
You leave the host of Sassy Justice out of this!
More nonsense from Dino Ironbody: Defender of Blackface and TERFs…
Is it because South Park is too irrelevant to make a difference any more? I mean, it’s not like The Simpsons is really in the cultural conversation any more (barring old bits resurfacing) and that held out in quality for a lot longer..
This the South Park-iest take of all. Good work.
This is fantastic and I can’t wait to see Trump throw a temper tantrum over it.
He’s gonna flip the fuck out (and go way the hell overboard like threatening to have Parker & Stone arrested or something) no matter how much people around him beg him to just ignore it.
Meh, he doesn’t give a fuck about anything unless his base does, and his base seems *waaay* beyond giving a fuck about whatever comedy central airs at this point.
This is both terrifying and the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time.
Bonus points for bringing back “super serial”.But otherwise meh.
People who watch Fox News also watch South Park, and they are the ones who need to learn about computer stuff the most. I love this idea.
The kind of people who yell upstairs or through the door “Are you ‘on that computer’ again?”?
aka: my mom
I think one of the biggest issues of South Park that the show has never addressed is why Stan, Kyle and Kenny continue to hang out with Cartman. Cartman is a bigot and fascist and both Stan and Kyle constantly admit they hate his guts. Yet why do they hang out with him. It’s even more concerning considering that Stan and Kyle are meant to be the shows moral authorities and author self-inserts.I’m not calling Matt and Trey racist, I’m saying that at worst they honestly don’t care about people like Cartman and the harm they cause unless it personally effects them. That’s South Park in a nutshell really: The problems of the world don’t really matter unless they personally effect Matt and Trey.
Like, these are the same assholes who created a fictional gay character and had said character say he was fine with being discriminated against based on his sexuality because organizations somehow have the right to do so and we shouldn’t protest against them.
The problem has been explored in the show before, in that they have tried to get rid of Cartman but are incapable of doing so because his personality is so toxic and manipulative that he’ll make it out that they’re the bad guy.Also in just narrative terms many of the commentaries the show goes through only happen because of Cartman’s toxicity, and if not for his evilness allowing that then all you have are three kids who are relatively nice.Personally I think people are way too quick to blame South Park, a show that less than a million Americans watch at airing, is the blame for voter apathy or shitty politics. All they do is mostly reflect the shitiness of that already corrupted politics that was created by others in a vulgar manner and are worryingly alone is saying that politics is fucked. Spitting Image did exactly the same in the UK throughout the 80s and that was watched by a third of the country yet no one claimed it caused voter apathy.It’s the public who decide more often than not to do nothing about that.
Yep, this.Or, put another way, if a scatological late-night cable cartoon could play even a minimal role in fracturing the republic, we were fucked from the get-go.
Is this comment real?
Its a satrirical TV-Show … this is why … its… satire…
“Why do Stan and Kyle hang out with Cartman” is the absolute dumbest criticism of South Park I’ve ever heard and I’m pretty sure you are 100% alone in being outraged at *that* of all things.
yeah it feels like an opinion an alien would have!
I think this Laserface fella might be a little unhinged. He makes the exact same weird complaints every single time the subject of South Park comes up (instead of just, y’know, accepting that the show’s not for him and moving on), and is known for digging through people’s comment histories to try to find things to incriminate them with.
Why does everyone think people they disagree with are “outraged” when they express an opinion they don’t agree with?No one is outraged, bro. Someone is just stating an opinion you disagree with.I await your “y u mad” reply
Because they all live next door to each other (except for Kenny) and in 3rd and 4th grade that’s basically how you choose who your friends are.
why Stan, Kyle and Kenny continue to hang out with Cartman. Cartman is a bigotIt’s never really bothered me. Uncle Ruckus is a virulent bigot and yet Grandad and Tom DuBois have no problem hanging out with him
The friend dynamic is relatable to me. In my small town grade school, we were either stuck with a few “friends” in our group that we hated or no friends at all.
I also think they deal with him is to stop the shit he does. Usually Stan and Kyle are the ones that always oppose Cartman. Kenny does to for the most part but there have been instances where he goes along with Cartman.
This is how young childrens’ friend groups work, especially in a small town. No one is morally outraged by their friends, and they don’t stop being friends unless one guys isn’t cool anymore. Kids fight about not liking the same TV show.But really, there’s a fairly obvious reason why they don’t stop hanging out with Cartman. What would the show be like then? What if Cheers didn’t take place in a bar? Why does Ross, the largest friend, simply not eat the other friends? What if Roseanne ditched Roseanne and just featured the rest of The Connors?
You go over the same shit on every article that’s even tangentially related to South Park. Chill.
This person can’t get over why TV characters don’t act like real people. It’s crazy.
Because like any sitcom the situation has to reset for every episode. The characters can’t really have any progressive memory of the other characters actions.
You could equally say why didn’t Marge divorce Homer years ago.
Statistically speaking, the Fonz would have died of Syphillis well before the show was cancelled. Then we would say ‘that show got Syphillis’ instead of the show jumped the shark.
I know it’s a really unpopular take right now, but if we all shun racist bigots, the only people they’ll have to talk to is other racist bigots. The racist bigotry will then become enforced and grow and fester until you have Donald Trump as president.
That’s kinda been my take, too, with bigots and other people I have a strong disagreement with, including Trump voters. There seems to be this idea that you have to immediately cut those people out of your life/feed/whatever, but it’s seems counter-productive and it just ends up shoving people further into their own algorithmically-fed media bubbles. Forgiveness/patience may not be fun or cathartic, but it’s a necessary component to a thriving, free society.Now, of course, I’m not saying you need to have unlimited patience with these people. If just being around them makes you (or those closest to you) too uncomfortable or angry to make normal interaction impossible, then, yeah, I guess you should probably cut ties.
Several people have said it, but at that age, the kids in your neighborhood are who you hung out with.
Because it’s a TV show created to entertain us and that is all. As a character, Cartman is comedy gold and it’s that interaction and conflict of his over the top toxic behavior with his normal friends that propels the story moving forward in comedic ways.
“I’m not calling Matt and Trey racist” Well, good, because that would be a huge, bizarre leap from your original point of “Why does an animated sitcom retain the status quo?”
That supposedly unaddressed issue is literally the most addressed issue in every “South Park” comment section on this site, and to all of those issues, I say:
For those who haven’t seen “Cannibal! The Musical,” the joke is that Swan sings several songs throughout the film about making snowmen, until the rest of the characters get fed up with Swan singing about wanting to make snowmen instead of trying to find food for the party, and then one of them shoots Swan in the head.
I think it translates.
“Well not butt!”
How did Swan make that tapping sound with his feet?
You are so full of shit.
Every kid has asshole friends that they can’t/won’t get rid of. You might have been the asshole friend back in the day.
Yep. You either tolerate them or you beat the shit out of them, which leads to a whole other thing.
When you a kid (especially in a small town), your friends are going to end up being whoever lives next to you or will sit with you at lunch. It’s not always an ideal situation (I’ve pretty much lost contact with most of my childhood friends). Once you’re an adult, you can afford to be choosier.However, this doesn’t mean South Park and its creators don’t have some things to answer for. I can’t really blame them wholly for voter apathy (it’s been a problem for a while), but that whole “Giant Douche or Turd Sandwich” episode didn’t help…
To be fair, nobody, not least two comedy show creators, expected we’d be watching a real time documentary about the rise of fascism unfold before our eyes. In the before time, the long, long ago, jokes about how politicians of all political stripes were just different shades of terrible could actually play.
They’re also really good at skewering virtue signalling, L.
So you’re just copying and pasting the same shit you wrote for the South Park “Pandemic Special,” eh? Give it a fuckin’ rest maybe. The same shit on every Trey & Matt/South Park-related item.
I’m convinced Laser’s in it for the stars. Which, considering that we’re on the goddamn AV Club, is pretty weird. And ironic given the ratios above us.
They established that way way way way early in the series, season one in fact. Cartman was the spoiled kid in their age group and they hung out with him for spill-over perks of Cartman getting whatever he wanted (including extravagant birthday parties).Furthermore, the show’s gone out of their way to tacitly state that Stan/Kenny have legit feelings of friendship with Cartman in so far as they have shared interests and that the chief unspoken reason WHY Cartman has such a hate boner for Kyle, is that he’s jealous of Kyle/Stan’s friendship and that Stan might like Kyle more than he likes Cartman as a friend.
It’s because it’s not real and in fact a funny cartoon show.
Why doesn’t Jerry the Mouse move to a different house where they don’t have a cat?Why does Charlie Brown still hang out with Lucy despite her continually knocking him on his ass?They’re cartoons.
Cartman is a bigot and fascist and both Stan and Kyle constantly admit they hate his guts. Yet why do they hang out with him.The most accurate portrayal of being a kid. Like, these are the same assholes who created a fictional gay character and had said character say he was fine with being discriminated against based on his sexuality because organizations somehow have the right to do so and we shouldn’t protest against them.Yeah that was bad. Unfortunately there are non-fictional gay people who say the same thing.
So we went from obviously fake Tarkin being the best that Disney could do with $200 million to “let’s impeccably recreate Julie Andrews for laffs” in just four years? That’s… horrifying, actually.
I don’t normally hold with re-doing movie f/x but if Disney wanted to release a Rogue One Special Edition where the only change they made was fixing Uncanny Valley Peter Cushing I would absolutely buy it.
Hornifying.
I really wonder if anyone can be fooled with the current deep fake tech. This video shows some of the best of the work but there are still plenty of tells and I think, for me at least, the uncanny valley still kicks in. Its not there yet but I bet in 5-10 years it will be fairly seamless and that is when the tech will truly get scary
The technology is already so good that you dont know when you are being fooled. You only see the tells/flaws in a show like this because they dont have the time and money to remove them. Big budget movies have tons of scenes where the actors face is put on a different body (or cg body) and nobody even realizes it.
Warch Tom Holland in Civil War when he is not in his Spiderman suit. Nobody ever talks about it but it looks like he was cgi’d in that.
Big budget movies have tons of scenes where the actors face is put on a different body (or cg body) and nobody even realizes it.
That’s been around for a while and yes, if it’s a quick action shot, it fools you. But if it’s something like creating Peter Cushing and 19-year-old Carrie Fisher from scratch in Rogue One or de-aging Jessica Lange and Robert De Niro in American Horror Story and The Irishman then you notice. It’s not necessarily glaring but there’s little tells that remind you this is being done with computers. The characters they’re playing aren’t jumping off of skyscrapers, they’re static and speaking – sometimes for long moments – so it becomes easier to pick up on those little details that just aren’t right.
Now, admittedly, we know that Peter Cushing was dead, Carrie Fisher was no longer 19, and Jessica Lange and Robert DeNiro were no longer in their 40’s when these projects were filmed, so we have an advantage in spotting those fakes right off the bat. Maybe if it was a video of Chuck Schumer or Mitch McConnell as they look at this exact moment in time – with camera clarity a bit lower than that of films and television shows that cost millions and millions of dollars to make – it would be easier to fool the viewer.
There’s a deepfake vs CG de-aging side by side comparison of DeNiro in The Irishman out there on YouTube. The YouTube deepfake looks so much more convincing than the 100+ million dollars worth of de-aging one wishes Scorcese had used that technique instead.
I call bullshit on your assessment.
Cf. Henry Cavill’s mustache — on a Marvel budget, they couldn’t make his face look convincing? It became a meme and news item before Marvel could get on top of it? The same Marvel who replaced people’s uniforms in CG without people taking note at first?
Cf. “Star Wars,” where everyone was able to pick out digital Carrie Fisher’s replacement face.
I wouldn’t say, like Nilus, that we’re five years away — more like two, I think — but I’d agree with them that we aren’t there yet.
If the technology is there, the technology sucks.
Regarding the mustache, my impression was that they made it look intentionally bad as retribution for his refusal to shave it. Like, obviously the guy has an issue with vanity, so they went straight at that?As far as Star Wars goes, I think part of that is that people were watching it on a fifty foot tall screen? It certainly makes it easier to spot sloppy little details than, say, on YouTube where you expect some pixilation and blur. Also there’s a suspension of disbelief issue from the start there since everyone watching that movie knew Carrie Fisher was not alive, much less that young anymore. Compare that to the confirmation bias a lot of people have to overcome when they see a deep fake that seems to prove what they’ve always suspected.
exactly. if you don’t have any reason to look at something critically or assume it’s fake you get a much different reaction than ‘here’s a deepfake can you see how it’s a deepfake?’it’s also probably a lot easier to fake something like a news talking head than, like, an entire star wars performance opposite real people (as you said) 50 feet tall.
Carrive fisher in Rogue 1 wasn’t a deep fake, nor was Caballero mustache or most of the Irishman.They used a little bit of AI in the Irishman, but by the time the movie came out, their tech was already old hat. The videos on YouTube of current deepfake tech side by side with the Irishman show its much better. Deepfake tech is very good but AI generation is a very different approach to the more traditional modelling, animation and drawing most effects companies do. I’m sure the big players will integrate the tech more and more from now on.
Caballero Mustache is a pretty hilarious auto correct.
Really? I’m already using it to replace myself in Zoom meetings. Granted, I still have to be there to provide the movement and audio, but at least my heart’s in the wrong place!
i quit facebook this year but i’ve seen them posted in earnest. never underestimate how much people want to believe what they see.
This would absolutely fool most middle-aged or older people if it sounded like Trump too.
I see sloppy work, possibly on purpose, for every deepfake in the video except for 90% of the Trump/Sassy footage. eventually it fucks up but I am shocked at the quality of that part of the show. I would bet they hired someone with a matching lower jaw and then just deep faked the rest of the face.. or something similar.
Have you watched Corridor Crew on Youtube? They go into depth when discussing deep fakes and they almost always use a celebrity impersonator when possible. My guess is that Matt and Trey found a Trump impersonator that was willing to be used as a base.
Zuckerberg in particular they’ve deliberately kept his eyes and the upper half of his head completely still.
when I went to show the spouse the clip I said he doesn’t blink right before he did a blink storm.. but I realized that if someone fakes Zuckerberg not blinking its not necessarily a failure if one of his traits people pick on him for is his lack of human movement XD
It’s less the idea that anyone can be fooled by it, and more the idea that people will believe whatever shit they want NOW, without that tech. Can’t help!
I want some dialysis!(vagina poop)
Omigod, it’s Tom Cruise!
Wow, I never realized Trump looked so much like William Shatner.
I like Peter Serafinowicz but this isn’t funny
dammit, Matt & Trey stop messing about with a web series and get back to work on more South Park, y’all set up the remote working pipeline for the pandemic special and just drop it? I’ll even take 4 more specials which would equal 1 season.
I really don’t understand why anyone ever thought that “I’m cereal” was funny.
I’m sure it chaffs Al Gore’s hide, but others may find a grain of humor in it.
How will I know what Gore is feeling unless he “takes to Twitter”? Oh wait, I don’t have Twitter
It was funny when the show first aired (pretty sure it was a joke about him misspelling “potatoes”), but yeah…didn’t really hit the spot in this.
You’re thinking of Dan Quayle.
I always preferred to think it was, “I’m serial.”…
Hot Take: This would be better without the Deep Fake.
Hot Fake
I think Peter Serafiniowicz did that before.
I’ve enjoyed his Sassy Trump videos but somehow I’m not really getting this.
I cannot emphasize enough that Parker and Stone, who endorsed George W Bush and who were unironic cheerleaders for the “war on terror” can, should and indeed must go fuck themselves.
When did they do those things?
Not sure, but it may be a reference to the South Park movies which, for all its america fuck yeah irony, still explicitly pushed that idea of “dicks” as a necessary evil to protect “pussies” against “assholes”.
I mean, I get who the “assholes” and “pussies” are, but which third party would the “dicks” represent in that scenario?
I’d say that, in that narrative, it was Bush. The Republicans. The “real men” who “have the guts” to go bomb the “assholes” in order to protect the “pussies”. Basically, the world-scale vigilante (anti)heroes, who may be brutal and, well, dick-ish, but “get the job done”, collateral damage or not. Our action movies are choke-full with them, we keep glorifying them in fiction, videogames, comic books, etc. And the South Park movie completely endorsed this on the geopolitical scene.
Gary: Uh… I know you all… don’t like Team America a whole lot right now but… Kim Jong Il is a lot worse. [the audience boos him and some members begin throwing stuff at him]Alec Baldwin: You can’t out-act me, boy. Don’t even try. [turns to address the audience] Well the truth is that Team America fights for the billion-dollar corporations. They are just as bad as the enemies they… fight. [2:12… 2:11… 2:10… the audience applauds the speech]Gary: Oh no we aren’t! We’re dicks! [everyone falls silent and looks around] We’re reckless, arrogant, stupid dicks! [a shot of three of his colleagues, then a shot of the audience] And the Film Actors’ Guild!.. are pussies. [a shot of Alec Baldwin] And Kim Jong Il!.. is an asshole. [a shot of Kim’s balcony, then of Kim] Pussies don’t like dicks!.. [Alec now faces him] because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes. Assholes who just want to shit on everything. [shots of a king, then of Lisa, then of the stage from the upper seats] Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way, but the only thing that can fuck an asshole… is a dick… with some balls. [a shot of more leaders] The problem with dicks is that sometimes they fuck too much, [a shot of Spottswoode] or fuck when it isn’t appropriate…Spottswoode: [from Mr. Rushmore, to himself] Yess, Gary, yess.Gary: …and it takes a pussy to show ‘em that. But sometimes pussies get so full of shit that they become assholes themselves. [a shot of Alec Baldwin] Because pussies are only an inch and a half away from assholes. [Lisa looks down at him] I don’t know much in this… crazy, crazy world, but I do know that if you don’t let us fuck this asshole, we are gonna have our dicks and our pussies!… all covered in shit. [the audience is stunned for a while, then begins to applaud him]African Ambassador: Tell us what you’re doing, Kim Jong Il!!Someone Else: Yeah, what are you doing, Kim Jong Il?!Kim: [getting nervous] Do something, Arec Bardwin!Alec Baldwin: The, the, …global warming and… corporate America and… [46… 45… ]Kim: Fire atcha! [arms his semiautomatic] You are worthless, Arec Bardwin! [fires several rounds into Alec Baldwin until Alec’s head comes off. The world leaders cause a commotion, but stay in their seats] Don’t fucking move!! [34… 33…] You were all going to be treated to a fabulous show, but now party’s over! For I am the great Kim Jong Il!============================================TL;DR Parker and Stone believe that in order to protect the weak and cowardly and helpless, you need people willing to do bad things in order to protect the cowardly, weak, and helpless from monsters who will do even worse things
So…for example…authorizing an extra-legal raid into the territory of a nominal ally for the express purposes of assassinating someone deemed an enemy of the state.That sort of thing?
You’re inferring personal politics on a film which was explicitly meant to be a satire on jingoism. That speech is basically them South Parking that “some people are wolves and some people are sheep” speech that old fat guys on facebook love and pointing out how stupid it sounds, not endorsing it.
That speech was from Team America which is a satire on the kind of jingoistic big budget rah rah america lets blow shit up action you’re complaining about in your next comment, not an actual endorsement or philosophy. It’s meant to be one of those “seemingly profound but really fucking stupid” speeches from the end of an action movie like the one in Independence Day.
I’m not amused. Because deep fakes really creep me out. I think they will be a defining issue of the next decade. A terrible entrenchment of ideological bubbles, which are already prone to dismiss as “fake news” any uncomfortable information. The danger will not come from the deep fake videos themselves, you can’t shrug it off saying that people will distrust them once they know what can be falsified. The issue is that it will be a powerful tool to disregard genuine videos, its revisionist power will be more passive than active. The more lies outside, the less credible the truth.And I really, really don’t see how this may be reversible. How it can be countered. You can (maybe) prove to people that a video is fake. But how can you prove that it is not ?
Indeed. The more bullshit that’s out there, the more reality can be dismissed.
The Zucc looks extra dead in that video.
OMG Zuck as a dialysis salesperson is AMAZING.
The Kushner segment was one of the funniest things I’ve seen all year.
This is genius and terrifying.
Y’know, I want to say fuck Trey Parker. He’s played a major role in promoting brainless ‘fuck everything’ nihilism to this country for 23 years. South Park had been part of the ‘hip ironic bigotry’ wave at the start of the millennium. Comics thought they could shame bigots by mirroring their beliefs back at them. All they did was reinforce the bigots’ world view in their own minds. Is there anything more ‘South Park’ than Boogaloo Boys, or whatever they’re called?
wrong spot