this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024
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(page 3) 41 comments
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[–] [email protected] 233 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (15 children)

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?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 10 months ago (5 children)

I get the feeling that most of these "experience' things I've been hearing about lately are low effort cash grabs.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (9 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I almost never click a video by someone I don't know these days. It's almost always a waste of time.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

This was one of the best reads I've had in a long time. Clicking the links to related articles is highly recommended.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

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?

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 10 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 110 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (4 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Hey now! Having an AI generate a Willy Wonka live production is part of getting the certification in some territories!

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Please let this Willy Wonka warehouse extra teach you about how to be business savvy.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (2 children)

You see, this was an intentional case-study in business failures, meant to exemplify the problems with using AI to replace every aspect of our lives. You might even call it art.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

So avant garde! Oh my!

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The only way this would have worked is if everyone had been given a little tab of lsd.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (1 children)

They only had enough in their budget to give LSD to all the organizers

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[–] [email protected] 88 points 10 months ago (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 10 months ago (1 children)

They didn't even proof read the promotional flyers to make sure they made sense. It's an absolutely absurd level of laziness.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You’re describing AI. We are in the get rich quick period of AI usage.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 190 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I know people don't read articles, but at least scroll down to the picture of "an Oompa Loompa running a meth lab"

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

I saw the meme yesterday before I knew about this and was confused haha

[–] [email protected] 190 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (7 children)
[–] [email protected] 33 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I had no context when I first saw this image and assumed it was something drug related.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (6 children)

The most ridiculous part of this story is the workers showed up, saw what it looked like, and just went to work...

Like, just lock the doors and go back home. Nothing good will come of trying to pull it off, and there's no way you're getting paid

[–] [email protected] 71 points 10 months ago

Going home doesn't get you a paycheck so that you can eat. Working is a chance to get paid, even if it looks like a guarantee that they won't to someone who isn't under that strain.

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[–] [email protected] 81 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The look in that poor girls eyes

[–] [email protected] 59 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I think she already knows she's not being paid.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You get a silver star for trying. This article is just too much for AI to re-write.

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