It was supposed to be an amazing children's party, but it ended with angry parents calling the police. The reckless organizers of Willy's Chocolate Experience, which was supposed to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, last weekend, they forgot the two mandatory rules of a party: don't mess with the feelings of the little ones or with their parents' wallets. The event . it had been advertised as “the place where chocolate dreams come true” with vivid images of fantasy worlds awash in sweets. Inspired by the character of Roald Dahl and the film about Wonka, promised a fantastic immersion in enchanted gardens and laboratories of the imagination. So hundreds of parents were persuaded to pay £35 for a ticket, only to find themselves in an industrial area of Whiteinch in “an empty, derelict warehouse with a handful of embarrassed actors trying to make the best of some good-looking props.” sad and from a bouncy castle”, writes the BBC.
The much-vaunted promises of chocolate fountains and “chocolate delights” designed by the organizers with artificial intelligence were completely invented: the children were instead offered half a glass of lemonade and a small portion of gummy sweets. A scam set up thanks to images of phantasmagorical sets which however never existed because they were created with AI. The company organizing the unfortunate event, the elusive “House of Illuminati”, then defended itself by speaking of an “event gone wrong” and promised full refunds, as well as acknowledging that it had used artificial intelligence to generate much of the marketing. According to the BBC, it would have been enough to go and see who was behind the organization of the most unsuccessful party of the year (and we are only in March) to smell the scam.
The previous one, the missing Christmas grotto
The canceled event had in fact been organized by Billy Coull, already involved in another sensational fiasco. In December 2021, a Santa Claus grotto in Glasgow was closed at short notice and under the guise of concerns over a variant of Covid. Coull, who was one of the organisers, had assured that food parcels and fuel vouchers would be distributed, but the public never knew what became of the toys that had been donated for the event before its cancellation.
Another venture Billy Coull is linked to is a now-defunct website called Empowercity that shared knowledge that was supposed to “enable even the man in the street to start and grow a largely profitable business.” Last summer, 17 self-published books appeared on Amazon by a Billy Coull who presents himself as an “enigmatic wordsmith from the lively streets of Glasgow” and a “rising star of the literary world” and promises, in one of his works, a “conspiratorial journey into the truths about vaccination”. And, again, AI is back on the scene: the reviewer of one of the books describes it as a “total nonsense full of meaningless sentences that have all the characteristics of a text written by AI”.
Some of the actors hired by Coull for the event inspired by the story of Willy Wonka They said they had been offered £500 for a weekend's work, but are now no longer so sure they will get paid. Paul Connellwho played Willy McDuff, a character apparently inspired by Wonka, told the BBC that he was handed “15 pages of AI-generated gibberish” as a script and tried to make the best of it even as things became increasingly more “scary” as the unfortunate customers realized the colossal dimensions of the scam.
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