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.
And as more details come to light, the more the event’s failure sounds inextricably tied to AI. In fact, insiders are now saying, even the scripts for the character actors were AI-generated.
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.
“Instead of getting Timothée Chalamet,” Connell said, referring to the actor who recently starred in a movie adaptation “Wonka,” “they got Timothée Charlatan.”
Connell says his script appeared to be made up “pretty much of AI-generated gibberish,” he said in his video.
“One of my favorite lines was, ‘There is a man who lives here, his name is not known so we call him the Unknown,'” he recalled. “‘The Unknown is an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls.'”
Even more bafflingly, the AI predicted in the script that visitors would react rapturously to the wonders around them.
A different script shared by author Séamas O’Reilly on Bluesky is just as baffling, with stage directions dictating “in detail, precisely how delighted the audience will be,” O’Reilly wrote. The original PDF was shared by UK tabloid The Daily Mail.
“Audience members engage with interactive flowers, offering compliments, to which the flowers respond with pre-recorded, whimsical thank-yous,” the script reads.
“Scene ends with the audience fully immersed in the interactive, magical experience, laughter and joy filling the air,” it continues.
As seems obvious in hindsight, none of that happened and the event was a catastrophic failure. It reportedly made children cry and parents call the police. One image of an actor has gone viral as “Meth Lab Oompa Loompa.”
The event is a cautionary tale for entertainers looking to cut corners with AI tools. Sure, AI can whip up fantastical imagery and low-effort dialog — but if audiences call BS, the blowback can be extraordinarily embarrassing.
In any case, the creatives behind the event sound epically unprepared. In a follow-up video, for instance, Connell recalled being asked to “suck up the Unknown with a giant vacuum cleaner.”
After getting stonewalled by the organizers — who didn’t have a vacuum cleaner to give him — and told to “improvise” instead, Connell was completely blindsided.
“Either you have a vacuum cleaner, or you don’t have a vacuum cleaner,” he said.
Connell wasn’t the only actor surprised to find that props promised by the script didn’t actually exist.
“There were parts in the script where we thought oh that sounds really good, because there were supposed to be interactive elements,” she told the Daily Mail. “There was a bit in the script where it was like if you touch the grass it will start laughing, and you thought oh so it’s got sensors in it, that will be really cool.”
“There were supposed to be bubble machines, there were supposed to be projectors, there was supposed to be so much more that was promised,” Fogarty added.
House of Illuminati is being run by Billy Coull, who has self-published 17 books on Amazon that were most likely generated by AI as well.
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 dust is still settling. Many of the actors, if not all of them, who were promised hundreds of dollars for their time, have yet to be paid, according to Connell.
The company has since promised to refund customers, but whether they’ll all actually get their money back remains to be seen.
Besides making innocent children cry, the Willy Wonka disaster also turned out to be a major source of embarrassment for actors, with Connell resorting to making light of his experience.
“It was a world of imagination in that you had to imagine it was not a dirty warehouse,” Connell joked in one of his videos.
More on the scam: Police Called After AI-Generated “Willy Wonka Experience” Is a Sad Mess in Real Life
