Matt Stone

Matt Stone (born 1971) is the co-creator of South Park alongside Trey Parker, his creative partner since their University of Colorado film-school days, and co-writer of The Book of Mormon. Across five Emmys, a Tony sweep, and nearly three decades of South Park, Stone has been the duo’s producer-brain — which is the role he plays again at their AI company.

Running the “rare company doing AI right”

Deep Voodoo grew out of a suspended 2020 Trump-deepfake feature: rather than dissolve the team of face-swap artists they had recruited, Parker and Stone spun it into a studio under their Park County banner, funded its R&D themselves, then took $20 million from CAA and NEA’s Connect Ventures in December 2022. Its work spans the “Sassy Justice” satire short, Kendrick Lamar’s “The Heart Part 5,” Billy Joel’s “Turn the Lights Back On,” and the photoreal Trump of South Park’s 2025 season.

Stone’s pro-AI case is pointedly not the usual one — he finds prompt-driven generation “tiresome” and insists Deep Voodoo’s pipeline starts with licensed images and a human performance, captured by a nine-camera rig and hundreds of thousands of frames per bespoke model. The Hollywood Reporter asked in 2025 whether Deep Voodoo is “the rare company doing AI right”; Stone’s answer is that the technology is a puppet and the artist is still the puppeteer.