Trey Parker
South Park Co-Creator
Co-creator of South Park and The Book of Mormon who co-founded the deepfake studio Deep Voodoo — he calls the technology “this new form of animation” and “a perfect medium for us.”
Why this score
How the formula works →- +3.9proBuilds AI professionally
- +2.3proUses AI in their work
- +2.3proHas published AI-made work
- +0.5pro1 pro-AI statement (forceful)
Weights, statement counts, the ×1.25 multiplier for having a stake in an AI-impacted field, and the formula’s smoothing are already baked in — the points add up to the score: Strongly Pro-AI · 9.0/10
In his words
It really is this new form of animation for people like us, who like to construct things on a shot-by-shot level and have control over every single actor and voice. It’s a perfect medium for us.
Biography
Trey Parker (born 1969) is the co-creator of South Park — television’s longest-running scripted satire, which he has written, directed, and voiced with Matt Stone since 1997 — and co-writer of The Book of Mormon, one of the most successful Broadway musicals ever staged. Few working comedians have his range: Oscar-nominated songwriter, five-time Emmy winner, and the animating voice (literally) of an entire comedic universe.
Deep Voodoo: a deepfake studio born from a movie
In early 2020 Parker and Stone assembled a team of the world’s best deepfake artists for a feature film — “Deep Fake: The Movie,” a comedy about a Trump lookalike — and when COVID suspended the project, they kept the team and built a company instead. Deep Voodoo debuted publicly with “Sassy Justice” (October 2020), a surreal deepfake news-parody short that put a face-swapped Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, and Al Gore on YouTube weeks before the U.S. election, and in December 2022 raised $20 million from Connect Ventures, the CAA–NEA investment partnership.
The studio has since supplied deepfake visual effects for Kendrick Lamar’s “The Heart Part 5” video and Billy Joel’s de-aged “Turn the Lights Back On” video, and Parker put the technology at the center of South Park itself — the show’s 2025 season opener rendered a photoreal deepfaked Trump, and its 2023 episode “Deep Learning” carried the on-screen writing credit “by Trey Parker and ChatGPT.”
Parker frames deepfakes not as a threat but as a director’s dream: total shot-by-shot control over every performer. His joke that Sassy Justice was “probably the single most expensive YouTube video ever made” doubles as a serious point — Deep Voodoo’s pitch is making that quality affordable for every creator.
Quote sources
- The New York Times via Collider, 2020(collider.com)
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/trey-parker
