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The viral fiasco in Scotland that made kids cry \u2014 and prompted calls to police. <\/p>\n
Willy Wonka, a storybook character who\u2019s known for the extraordinary treats he creates, was recently featured in an event that was anything but.<\/p>\n
In Glasgow, Scotland, families looking forward to an immersive event billed as \u201cWilly\u2019s Chocolate Experience\u201d were met with what they described as an empty warehouse filled with lackluster decorations and few, if any, of the promised treats. Instead, parents and kids were given a half cup of lemonade and two jelly beans each<\/a>, hardly the \u201cworld of pure imagination\u201d they signed up for. <\/p>\n \u201cThere was maybe 20 chairs, a couple of tables and a half-inflated bouncy castle,\u201d Stuart Sinclair, a father of three who brought his kids to the event, told the New York Times<\/a>. Photos of the gathering, which featured sparse decor, frightening new characters, and a disheartened-looking oompa loompa, have captivated people on social media for the last few days.<\/p>\n A \u2018Willy Wonka\u2019 \u201cimmersive experience\u201d that promised to transport fans into a \u201cmagical realm\u201d left kids in tears.<\/p>\n The event turned out to be such a letdown that customers called the police and compared the attraction to a \u201cmeth lab.\u201d pic.twitter.com\/h0tGykPzzY<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Pop Crave (@PopCrave) February 28, 2024<\/a>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n apparently this was sold as a live Willy Wonka Experience but they used all AI images on the website to sell tickets and then people showed up and saw this and it got so bad people called the cops lmao pic.twitter.com\/tfkyg0G0WG<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Chris Alsikkan (@AlsikkanTV) February 26, 2024<\/a>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n The disappointing, barren, and comical nature of the event brings to mind past scams like that of the botched music festival, Fyre Fest,<\/a> which brought hundreds of concertgoers to the Bahamas for poorly produced concerts that ran low on water. There\u2019s just something about a disastrously executed scam \u2014 at least a fairly benign one \u2014 that people can\u2019t seem to get enough of.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s something more than schadenfreude going on here: The saga renews scrutiny, too, on the ongoing boom in live events \u2014 a market that\u2019s expected to double globally<\/a> between 2022 and 2032 \u2014 and how difficult it can be for consumers to verify that they\u2019re getting exactly what they\u2019re paying for. <\/p>\n Additionally, the experience is the latest to draw attention to the weird role artificial intelligence<\/a> \u2014 and its potential dangers \u2014 occupies in our culture right now. Advertisements for the gathering, which were ridden with typos, were similar to those created by AI, per a Business Insider investigation<\/a>. And at least one actor hired for the event has accused House of Illuminati, the company behind the event, of using AI to write the script for the experience<\/a>, which is said to have featured nonsensical phrases and odd new characters that don\u2019t exist in the books or related movies<\/a>. <\/p>\n Beyond serving as a source of entertainment for everyone but the children who attended, the fiasco raises new questions about comparable scams, and how AI can be used to advance them.<\/p>\n The event was put on by a London-based company called House of Illuminati, which relied heavily on ads that did not depict any aspect of the event itself. Notably, it also wasn\u2019t affiliated with the estate of author Roald Dahl, Warner Bros., or the Wonka franchise at all. <\/p>\n A prescient Reddit user appeared to predict that it could be a scam, warning people against the gathering more than two weeks ago<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201cHas anyone else been getting FB ads for \u2018Willys Chocolate Experience?\u2019\u201d user @Prestigious_Try4610 wrote. \u201cEvery image is AI generated along with all the gibberish text it try\u2019s to create. Not 1 single picture giving people an idea of what they are shelling out money for and yet people are buying up tickets.\u201d<\/p>\n In lieu of actual photos, the website<\/a> featured colorful illustrations and promised \u201ca chocolate fantasy,\u201d \u201cmagical surprises,\u201d and \u201coptical marvels.\u201d <\/p>\n Parents, who paid about $44 a ticket,<\/a> and even an actor who participated, say it fell way short, and didn\u2019t even include chocolate.<\/p>\n \u201cIn some ways, it was a world of imagination, like imagine that there is a whole chocolate factory here,\u201d Paul Connell, one of the actors hired to portray Wonka, quipped to the Independent<\/a>. Connell noted he had concerns following the rehearsal, but assumed they\u2019d be allayed by showtime: \u201cI spoke to the people running it and thought, surely by the morning it won\u2019t look like this, and then I turned up in the morning and it absolutely did.\u201d<\/p>\n The event was so bad that the police were called at one point (though the reason was unclear), and it had to be shut down on Saturday afternoon, before it completed its full weekend run.<\/p>\n Since the fiasco, House of Illuminati has said it will issue refunds, with its events director, Billy Coull, offering an apology in an interview with STV News<\/a>. \u201cMy vision of the artistic rendition of a well-known book didn\u2019t come to fruition,\u201d he said. \u201cFor that, I am absolutely truly and utterly sorry.\u201d<\/p>\n The \u201cWilly\u2019s Chocolate Experience\u201d saga has highlighted just how few barriers there are when it comes to the use of deceptive marketing to make money, and how AI might be used to make scams easier to execute. <\/p>\n Police were called to an ‘immersive’ Willy Wonka Experience after families showed up to an ’empty warehouse’ <\/p>\n The event reportedly charged $40 for entry, advertised with AI art, and said it would be a ‘journey filled with wondrous creations and enchanting surprises at every\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/udz8KeWVxQ<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Culture Crave (@CultureCrave) February 27, 2024<\/a>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n Business Insider\u2019s Beatrice Nolan looked into the allegations about AI crafting the Wonka advertising and found that the publication was able to generate comparable images. \u201cSeveral of the images featured on the website have telltale signs of AI art, and Business Insider was able to create very similar images using AI,\u201d she wrote<\/a>. Those signs include a surreal use of scale, poorly rendered fingers, and unnaturally delineated forms.<\/p>\n This saga was, realistically, small stakes. It\u2019s a reminder, however, of how AI and other marketing can promise something to people, and really, really fail to deliver. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.\u00a0 | Silver Screen Collection\/Getty Images The viral fiasco in Scotland that made kids cry \u2014 and prompted calls to police. Willy Wonka, a storybook character…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":335,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.washnow.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.washnow.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.washnow.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.washnow.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.washnow.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.washnow.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":336,"href":"http:\/\/www.washnow.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333\/revisions\/336"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.washnow.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.washnow.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.washnow.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.washnow.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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How this disastrous event even took place<\/h3>\n
The AI of it all<\/h3>\n
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