Willy Wonka AI

🔷 Subscribe to get breakdowns of the most important developments in AI in your inbox every morning.

Here’s today at a glance:

• AI Golden Ticket

• Things happen

• AI artwork of the day

🥇 AI Golden Ticket

Hilarious AI happenings in Glasgow, Scotland

• The House of Illuminati promotes Willy’s Chocolate Experience

• “a place where chocolate dreams become reality”, a 45-minute theme-park-like experience in an industrial warehouse on the banks of the River Clyde off the A739 motorway

• Tickets priced at up to £35 ($45 US dollars)

Except the AI-generated marketing collateral is just a little too big for its britches perhaps:

This, my friends, is a masterpiece of absurdity, “Encherining Entertainment” in the banner, above a Wonka-like figure surrounded by lollipops and teddy bears, with a subheading of special features:

• Catgacating

• Live Performances

• Cartchy Tuns

• Exarserdray Lollipops

• Pasadise of Sweet Teats

In Scotland, the land of Harry Potter, where coining unusual words to imply magical wonder has become the norm, this was catnip. However, in the original Willy Wonka:

• Willy, a chocolate factory owner, announces a contest. 5 kids who find a golden ticket in a chocolate bar get a tour of his factory and a lifetime supply of chocolate

• Charlie, a poor kid, finds a ticket.

• During the tour, all the other kids have bad things happen to them because they are naughty

• At the end, Willy gives the factory to Charlie for being good

Meaning the original story was actually that of the factory owner lying to kids about the “Golden Ticket” and tricking them into having bad things happen to them at some deserted industrial location.

Kinda like the Box Hub Warehouse in Glasgow:

In a sense, this was the most faithful Willy Wonka experience that could have possibly been built. An immense buildup of youthful expectations, followed by a sledgehammer crushing the same to tiny little pieces.

The Illuminati in this case seem to have been responsible:

• hired and trained actors for months before the event

• had issues with “many areas of the event” but “decided to push through”

• are very sorry and offered “full refunds“

Of course, the real issue is that the AI (Looks like StableDiffusion to me) was astoundingly much better at producing marketing collateral than the low effort Illuminati could have done. In effect, the marketing so outclassed the product, that the customers were abysmally disappointed.

This did not used to be a problem because a low-effort, bad-quality product team could usually be depended upon to have a low-effort bad-quality marketing effort, with notable exceptions like the Fyre Fest.

But now AI has leveled the playing field gloriously. Just look at these webpage gems.

Twitter points out that the original Golden Ticket was supposed to be a scam:

The actors responded that they only had four days’ notice:

And of course, always blame the AI for everything

Really, it seems like we’re going to have to expect much better digital quality for everything, and the instinctual filters that we used to use to filter out less-than-good experiences have to be upgraded.

This is, of course, an arms race… if you have a good product, you’re going to be expected to have at least AI-good marketing... or else you will be seen as not having done the bare minimum necessary.

Of course, let’s not mention copyright, which the House of Illuminati surely just absolutely ignored in setting this up.

Share this story

 🗞️ Things Happen

• Tech billionaire-funded Arc Institute, which focuses on fundamental biology breakthroughs, announces a vision towards a “biological foundation model that unites DNA, RNA, and protein modalities and operates at molecular, systems, and genome levels of scale.“

🖼️ AI Artwork Of The Day

That’s it for today! Become a subscriber for daily breakdowns of what’s happening in the AI world: