Actor at Willy Wonka Disaster Says Even the Script Was AI-Generated
The company that organized the Willy Wonka experience used AI to generate marketing and even the scripts for actors.
Am I supposed to be mad at these small time con-men capitalists? This is what the modern global economy is all about. Attempting to fuck over the people who aren't you, attempting to receive the maximum while providing the absolute minimum you can get away with without consequences. Their mistake was only slightly miscalculating that minimum where people would feel cheated but otherwise leave minus their money grumbling, but not enough to make it a weird news of the day story.
When's the last time your fast food sandwich looked remotely like the one on all the signs?They look like that sandwich in the ad was a tire that got deflated, deforming under its own weight, at best. Those scammers just had swaths of lawyers and lobbyists to make their false advertising your problem, until now it's just how it is. Deception is a vital component of market capitalism.
Why are you harassing these glorious, aspiring job creators acting in rational self-interest?
Our society is long overdue giving con men the ass kicking they deserve.
Can we start with the con-men hurting/exploiting millions and threatening billions with their "externalities," capitalist Orwellian shorthand for "I already have your money, so my mess is your problem, you stupid fucking suckers🖕🤑🖕?"
Because these bottom feeders are just a symptom of the above's global sociocultural damage. They ruined some kid's afternoons (but when those grown kids are dying from capitalist made climate change induced Cat 6 superstorms, or hungry from the associated crop failures, or the scammers successfully lobby to catch yet another tax break out of the asses of those kid's education funding using their unlimited exploitation bucks, 🤷). It might be cathartic to kick their ass, but it's odd and inconsistent to the extreme considering how comfortable we are with our most prolific con-men being allowed to own, and keep!.. everything, every exploited, scammed dollar, instead of getting their ass kicked as you say.
Back to the days of running the snake oil salesmen out of town tarred and feathered?
What? They didn't slightly miscalculate the minimum, they grossly blasted past it. Yes, your point is that false advertising is a spectrum, and a certain amount is generally expected, but this isn't in some mushy grey area of it, it's egregiously over the line. Yeah food doesn't look like it does on the packages, but if this event were food it would be a grey goop. Frankly I find your attempt at ignoring magnitude lazy, sloppy, and cynical.
Lol magnitude? Really? These microcapitalists ruined these kids afternoon with their scam, while the ones these scammers emulate poison them with microplastics and Threaten their ONLY habitat, to the scam shareholder's applause and most of society considering them aspirational figures, buying the scam of "sometimes companies make a mess, it isn't their problem or responsibility, and we call this competely valid economic event an externality herp derp 🤡."
Also Most corporate run INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY EXPERIENCE exhibitions are only one step up from this in terms of marketing vs reality. They calculated the formula of acceptable customer mark dissatisfaction from intentionally dishonest marketing hype correctly.
So please, do continue telling me more about the magnitude of these microcapitalist's microscam.
sits in Wonka meme pose.
I know people don't read articles, but at least scroll down to the picture of "an Oompa Loompa running a meth lab"
lmao
I had no context when I first saw this image and assumed it was something drug related.
It's one of those meth labs where the t is silent.
The look in that poor girls eyes
Speaking to MailOnline, she confirmed that not only had she not been paid she also hadn't been briefed on what her role would involve. She explained: 'I was angry at the time because I felt like this is embarrassing for me, and I felt bad for the people coming in as well. I actually ended up shouting at the guy. I just said to him he’s a joke and this is like embarrassing, and how can we basically live with himself, doing this to people. This is really embarrassing for me. My job is teaching kids yoga and I go into schools and stuff and I do kids’ entertainment. This is none of our faults at all. We got the job and then we got given the script. By that point I’d signed a contract and they said they were going to put us £500 for the two days which is a lot of money which is a lot of money to say no to.'
I saw the meme yesterday before I knew about this and was confused haha
Coull appears to be the only official employee of the company, ...he presents himself as a business-savvy life coach.
Life coach, why am I not surprised?
Hey now! Having an AI generate a Willy Wonka live production is part of getting the certification in some territories!
Matt Foley was a Life Coach. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv2VIEY9-A8
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I look forward to more AI failures and flops and hope the public and financial backlash is intense for each every one of them. You cannot automate human creativity, and until the powers that be feel that in their wallets, we're going to be getting more and more of this inane drivel while actual, talented writers lose job opportunities.
The company has since promised to refund customers, but whether they'll all actually get their money back remains to be seen.
I'd be demanding it in full.
This was clearly a scam from the start. AI art is a tool, just like a paintbrush - if you don't know what you're doing (or if you just dont give a fuck, like this event), the outcome will understandably be shit.
Exactly. Whatever happened to, blame the artist not the tools?
This wasn't a failure of AI. It was just a low-effort charade. If you want to put in the least amount of effort possible in such things, AI is there for you.
If they had put in any effort whatsoever they would've taken the first "draft" BS generated by the AI, made some minimal changes, then fed it back into the AI for further improvement.
Chat AIs are just that: Chat. You're supposed to go back and forth in conversation with the AI in order to get a good result. It appears the organizers of this event put together some terrible prompts and didn't even bother to spend an extra ten minutes refining things.
AI is a tool like any other. This pathetic event is a textbook case of how AI can't replace humans entirely (not yet, anyway). You still gotta put in some effort.
It's gonna be the new Dot Com bubble. Sure, we'll have to deal with this nonsense for another year or two, but once it gets to the point of insanity/critical mass hopefully that's when people stop throwing AI at everything.
I see ads all around my city for the new Galaxy S24, it looks the exact same as my S23, and probably has the same hardware, mostly, but their new selling point is that it comes with AI. That's literally the only thing on the billboard.
Problem is, even when we get over this shit and hire the "creatives" back, they won't be getting the same wages.
And a lot of the money that could go to the artists is going to go to these silicone valley pricks, too. Never think for a second the people making AI like this don't appreciate what they're doing. This shit is custom built to steal the livelihood from artists and put it directly into their own pockets.
You're coming from a very selfish perspective, it's just capitalism rotting your brain.
Ai is being designed to help solve problems that affect billions of people, it's already able to do amazing things that greatly improve people's lives in many ways. You're ignoring all of that and discounting it simply because you're only worried about your own selfish interests, and you're ignoring the benefit it could have on your life simply because you fear change.
Being able to get explanations of things in your own language and ask questions is huge for people from underdeveloped regions of the world, especially for subjects like coding where documentation is always terse, technical, and always in English. Though I've already used it myself to help understand a German project, also projects written in coding languages I haven't studied - and wow is it useful for languages I do know well, it's increased my productivity hugely on my open source project. being able to do things like drop in a choice block and say 'put these elements in a sizer' saves so much time, dropping a line in and saying 'what are the options for formating this?' and it gives me direct and comprehensive answers - that could have been half an hour in the documentation.
Of course I make open source software to help give people the tools they need to live better lives, for me the more I can create the more tools I and everyone have to improve our lives - I'm trying to move towards a better world where people don't need to beg corporations for scraps by performing doggie tricks for them, you want to keep rolling over and eagerly giving you creativity to advertising agencies and corporate owned movie studios so they can sell more shit to the masses. Stop figuring to protect capitalism it doesn't give a shit about you.
Yeah, this is just people misapplying the AI tools we are given. They're not close to General AI, you certainly can't expect them to do all the work for you yet.
You cannot automate human creativity
Yet
You didn't even say if you are for or againt it and just stated the truth and people downvoted you for that. Lmao
Connell wasn't the only actor surprised to find that props promised by the script didn't actually exist.
So there was never a dress rehearsal and the performance was a cold read? AI may be to blame for the bad script, but there many other points of failure happening here.
Apparently they were given the script only a day before. And on the day of, they were told to just let people walk through, and improvise. Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/galleries/article-13134989/Embarrassed-Oompa-Loompas-actresses-Wonka-scam-talks.html
Is ai even to blame for the bad script? Because if a human being wrote it with the same effort and care applied to every aspect of this it’d still be terrible.
I’m not even saying ai can write as well as a person at the half ass level, but this isn’t even there
I think i read this story when it was called huckleberry finn.
It was that book, right? Where the con man sold tickets to a "ribald show" which ended up just being one dude running around naked?
Doesn't sound much worse than the Avengers experience that came to my city. It was like $30 for a 10 minute walkabout of a big room with the avenger costumes and a bunch of costumes, I felt ripped off
I get the feeling that most of these "experience' things I've been hearing about lately are low effort cash grabs.
I went to the office experience in Chicago a few years ago and it was awesome. They literally recreated the entire office layout with all the props and everything.
From what I understand the Jurassic world one was actually really good and they put in the effort
From what I understand the Jurassic world one was actually really good and they put in the effort
Or like the Friends experience that is a yearly occurrence in Manhattan. I'm a huge fan of the show and lived in NYC for 5 years, but I never went there. The first time I saw it, my girlfriend and I walked by the place it was at, and it was a shitty re-creation of Central Perk. There were like 100 people lined up on the sidewalk just to go inside and sit on the orange couch and drink coffee. James Michael Tyler (who played Gunther, the barista) was also there.
There's a bit more to it than just the Central Perk part. They've recreated the apartments and a few other major scenes and have a lot of props from the show. We had just finished a rewatch of the show and found it pretty enjoyable on a rainy day in the city. I think we spent about an hour in there and came out with some cool staged scene pictures. I still thought it was overpriced, but didn't feel ripped off.
Ick. To a very specific audience - prop makers - that $30 is a great deal to get up close looks at costumes and props whose details don't always show up on screen.
Sucks if they advertised it as more, though.
Sure, AI can whip up fantastical imagery and low-effort dialog — but if audiences call BS, the blowback can be extraordinarily embarrassing.
I see AI generated bullshit on youtube all the time these days. To the point where I can tell by the thumbnail before I even watch it. I've gotten in the habit of checking out new-to-me channels in a private window first, before deciding whether I want to subscribe or even keep watching. The instant I detect any AI... either in the voice or the nonsensical writing, I'm outa there. I do e-learning multimedia for a living, and we use a lot of stock images, and those sites are being loaded up with AI generated garbage. It's getting harder to find stuff that isn't AI, and using it to generate your own is a total crapshoot as far as results go...
Same here, generally, but I think there are a tiny few people who have a legitimate reason for using TTS. For instance, those whose English skills are lacking, or who have an accent which some might find distracting. Or a person who is self-conscious about their voice but still has something to offer, or maybe those who legitimately can't speak at all. Hell, I support anyone who could narrate but doesn't want to put their voice out there for privacy reasons, or to keep it out of the public space where it will inevitably be used as training data.
I'd still rather listen to the human, because I can't stand any of the "AI" voices, especially those that are used on every fucking tiktok (I stay away from TT, but unfortunately the voices are pretty ubiquitous). It might sound silly but I'd prefer good old Microsoft Sam to the any of these new voices.
One channel I found recently for coding-related topics uses TTS but before I got annoyed enough to close it, I realized that the script was probably hand-written, just narrated by a machine. The video was highly informative, and I walked away having learned some new information. For the curious
Something that sucks about this new wave of TTS is that we get some odd errors in pronunciation that probably wouldn't be there if it was spoken by a human. A missing comma or other punctuation errors will pass a spell check but end up sounding really strange due to the broken inflection. Uncanny Valley stuff I suppose.
AI thumbnails are utter garbage though. All polish, no substance, no love for the craft.
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I almost never click a video by someone I don't know these days. It's almost always a waste of time.
I've recently been using the home page on YT (in addition to my bookmark, which takes me straight to /feed/subscriptions) and I've been pleasantly surprised. It seems like the algorithm is generally pretty good at finding similar videos to the ones I enjoy. That is unless I scroll waaaaay down, where it just runs out of ideas. I would recommend trying out your home page, with some light pruning as needed ("Not interested", "Don't recommend channel").
Yup. I think the worst offenders are the videos that are just Wikipedia pages with still images and an AI text-to-speech robot voice. It's the world's laziest form of "content creation" and I always downvote them.
this isn't so much a failure of AI generated anything. it's a failure by the organisers to have the budget needed to do it. this was 100% human fuck up. So weird the article tries to spin it that it's somehow an AI fail.
The AI part is what makes this fuck up special and international news.
We are used to human fuck ups, but a in person event where the organizers where so lazy that they used AI to create the content and that it sucked is something novel.
AI generated pictures, blogs and books are old news, generated in person events is new.
The head guy self published something like a dozen AI generated books that he's selling on Amazon too
The best part about this event was the new Wonka lore of The Unknown, an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls
Therqpist: "The evil chocolate maker in the walls isn't real, he can't hurt you!"
Me: gestures to this article
This whole event reads more like an artist trying to showcase the dangers of machine learning models. It's honestly hilarious to see how people just fell for some pretty pictures that were clearly generated with AI and ended up at an oompa loompa meth lab.
People going in expecting a fun adventure with Willy Wonka and having a horrible time because it was created by an asshole trying to teach them a lesson...sounds like the plot of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!
This feels like an episode of The Apprentice. Lord Sugar (appropriate!): “Willy Wonka? More like Willy Wanker.” Cut to sweaty Project Manager about to be fired.
So the script called for some of the Wonka's to use vacuums, but they didn't have vacuums, so they had to improvise.
But they managed to pull out a chemistry set.
What the fuck is happening.
The only way this would have worked is if everyone had been given a little tab of lsd.
They only had enough in their budget to give LSD to all the organizers
Wow. This feels like a terrific future gameshow quiz topic:
"Given the following true news story, was the complete failure of this effort later attributed to:
"
It's Glasgow mate, you're not allowed to mix it with heroin.
This was one of the best reads I've had in a long time. Clicking the links to related articles is highly recommended.
This is the type of thing to keep in your back pocket for days when you need perspective. Sure you messed up today. But did you Billy Coull your day?
I like the rolling stone article where he also sells AI generated vaccine conspiracy books.
Is Blaming-the-AI killing off the Blaming-the-Intern industry???
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Over the weekend, organizers of what was described as a "Willy Wonka Experience" in Scotland duped unsuspecting parents into bringing their kids to a truly dmsial event using clearly AI-generated marketing materials.
The $44-a-ticket experience turned out to fall well short of the fantastical landscapes dreamed up by an AI, with cheap-looking props sparsely populating a dirty warehouse near downtown Glasgow.
Local actor and comedian Paul Connell explained on TikTok how he was hired to be one of the three — not just one — Willy Wonkas tasked to entertain children at the event.
"Scene ends with the audience fully immersed in the interactive, magical experience, laughter and joy filling the air," it continues.
Sure, AI can whip up fantastical imagery and low-effort dialog — but if audiences call BS, the blowback can be extraordinarily embarrassing.
As Rolling Stone reports, Coull appears to be the only official employee of the company, and has since scrubbed many of his social media accounts, including a YouTube and LinkedIn profile, where he presents himself as a business-savvy life coach.
The original article contains 728 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
You get a silver star for trying. This article is just too much for AI to re-write.
AutoTldr does not use "AI".
All these sentences can be found in the original article, it is just using a statistical approach which sentences to keep.
They shouldn't blame the AI for this. This was obviously the humans not recreating the AI's artistic vision.
"Audience members engage with interactive flowers, offering compliments, to which the flowers respond with pre-recorded, whimsical thank-yous," the script reads.
I like to imagine that this whole event was the result of the first truly rogue AI that generated its own plans for an event, sent out the necessary emails to hire the people to put it together, and everything in secret under its creator's nose.
It probably isn't that, though. Because even AI wouldn't fuck up this badly.
If you haven't seen the website for the event, do yourself a favor and check it out. The AI typos in the images are hilarious.
Meth lab oompa loompa is my favorite meme of the year so far. It juxtaposed so well to the wonder and silliness of the movies, lmao.
Moist Critikal's video on this was a banger
Searched for it on YouTube, but there's so many remixes and reaction videos and reposts and other bullshit that I honestly am not sure I found the right one.
Is this it?
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