Willy Wonka Experience actor speaks out about event that left him crying in his car
The comedian who played Willy Wonka in the disastrous Scottish pop up was not living in a world of pure imagination
Aux News Wonka
Remember the name Paul Connell. You’ll almost definitely hear from the 31-year-old comedian again when the inevitable warring documentaries about disastrous Scottish popup Willy’s Chocolate Experience—a.k.a. Fyre Fest for kids—finally come out.
For the past 48 hours, the internet has been captivated (or perhaps gazing in abject horror) at a mostly empty warehouse in Glasgow where parents unknowingly brought their kids to be terrorized by a Babadook knockoff and receive a small glass of lemonade and a single jellybean for their troubles. The scam was advertised by a group called “House of Illuminati,” which made a lot of big promises using entirely A.I. generated gibberish. If all went according to plan, guests could have experienced “cartchy tuns,” “exarserdray lollipops,” or even “a pasadise of sweet teats.”
But all did not go according to plan. Children cried, parents screamed, and police were eventually called to the scene as frustrated ticket holders desperately sought refunds amidst the chaos.
Now, Willy Wonka himself—a.k.a. Paul Connell—is finally breaking his silence. “I got a phone call on Thursday saying, ‘Congratulations you are going to play Willy Wonka,’” Connell told The Independent in a groundbreaking interview, wherein he admitted that “the script was 15 pages of AI-generated gibberish of me just monologuing these mad things.”
Still, Connell tried to stay the course. The real Willy with his many tests would have been proud. “The bit that got me was where I had to say, ‘There is a man we don’t know his name. We know him as the Unknown. This Unknown is an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls,’” he shared. Hence, the terrifying Babadook. “They even misspelt my contract but I do have a legally binding ‘Coontract’ [sic],… but I stayed up all night learning it, thinking this would make sense in the dress rehearsal when I see all the tech.”
He was wrong, of course. “In some ways, it was a world of imagination, like imagine that there is a whole chocolate factory here,” he said. (Someone real, please hire this guy!) It seems organizers hadn’t even read their own, physically impossible script. At one point, Connell was supposed to “suck up the Unknown Man with a vacuum cleaner.” When he asked if they even had a vacuum cleaner, he got: “yeah, we haven’t really got there yet, so just improvise.”
The actor went on to confirm that there was, indeed, no chocolate at the chocolate factory experience, and he was forced to play Wonka for three and a half hours straight although he had been promised breaks every 45 minutes. When he did finally snag one, he apparently spent it crying in his car. “It was heartbreaking, to be honest. There were kids in costume better than ours, crying. I used to be a teacher and that was triggering for me.”
Connell did specify that “everyone has been so nice to the actors” who they knew weren’t responsible, but the actors “gave abuse to the people running it. The whole thing was disrespectful to the families and us as promising actors.”
Connell isn’t the only actor to speak out. In a new Facebook group titled “house of illuminati scam,” other Oompa Loompas and the like have chimed in, claiming their contracts were signed in “erasable ink” and that they “doubt any of us will receive a penny.” For Connell’s part, he just wishes he could move on. “It’s a night I’ll try to forget,” he concluded. “Sadly, not only will I remember it, everyone I know will remember it too.”
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If nothing else, I am hopeful this event will help the public associate “AI art” with low-effort shady bullshit.
I think the art they used is pretty cool looking. Non ‘AI’ generated art is used for loads of shady purposes so I guess that’s bad too?
It’s a lot likelier that a group not willing to pay money for art will also not be willing to spend money putting on a good show.
Say that I agree with that statement: It applies just as well to hand drawn art, art created in Illustrator that’s totally hand drawn, art created in Illustrator that makes extensive use of their numerous automated tools, ‘AI’ generated art, etc…
But…dude, c’mon, if an organizer is going to pay an actual artist for their work, and not just slap some words into a generator and call it a day, it stands to reason that said organizer is going to put that effort into other areas of the show.IDK man, I’m getting that you’re more sympathetic to AI art or anti-luddite shit, but the other side of the argument actually has some points as well.
I’m pushing back against the idea that ‘AI’ art = automatically bad, because generalization like that is ignorant.I’m always in favor of progress and, as someone who really sucks at art, am all for progress that allows me to create cool artistic stuff even if nobody ever guesses the things I hand draw in Pictionary.
Edit: Sorry, grabbed that bit from the wrong reply.
And there it is.
you’re calling theft “progress” and scams “progress”. And you’re shrugging off the very serious negative parts of these things, and the very negative uses for them, because then you get to play pretend.
Just a heads up: when you “create” something with the AI? you’re not creating anything. you’re stealing from others who created, and then having a robot roll dice for you. You’re better off playing pictionary every day of your life and improving, developing actual skills, creating actual things, than using these theft engines.
And there it is, a solid example of the ignorant generalization I referenced.
I mean, you haven’t exactly refuted their point there. You haven’t created something when you ask AI to make it for you. You wouldn’t say “I cooked my own meal” if what you actually did was tell a chef what you wanted to eat and watched them make it for you, but at least if you did that you’d be paying a human for work that you valued. True creation takes effort and application of skill and passion, and the fact is most people will appreciate even the crudest little scribbles if they know you made them yourself out of genuine creative instinct.
Me using ‘AI’ to generate art because I’m really bad at art is just another way of using a tool to make work better and easier.
Here’s how it works: Someone makes a tool and the tool gets used. This is progress. The advanced algorithms currently called ‘AI’ are another tool and claiming that their use is always theft is ignorant generalization. ‘AI’ is making huge strides in medicine, for example, but I guess people like Nate Horsefall would refuse to use any meds developed with ‘AI’ aid because it’s theft.
It’s entirely possible human artists create things in an analogous way. We don’t know. It seems hubristic (and scientifically unsupported) to assume that computers will never be able to replicate the phenomenon. What is the fundamental difference between a computer made of semiconductors and one made of neurons? It seems like the only possible answers are A, there is no difference, B, that the difference has yet to be found and described, or C, the difference cannot be discerned by science as it is not capable of being described by logic. The last one would be a soul and would imply some kind of religious or spiritual belief. Which one do you think is correct? If it’s C please just say that and I’ll take that as your opinion. Metaphysical matters aren’t amenable to debate so I think discussing them would be a waste of time for both of us if we disagree.
Brains are not computers.
And even if they are computers, they are qualitatively different from man-made computers in all sorts of ways that are perfectly discernable, and known, to science and logic. Such as not being digital. Or not “processing information” (if that’s even the right term) sequentially, or in discrete units of time. And many more.
And even if they are the same, brains learn art completely differently from AI generators. Human artists learn from existing artists… some. But they learn more from lived experience, from the natural world around them, and from whim and experimentation. AI generators are placed in a black box from birth with no experience of the world beyond their “minds” but a barrage of nonsensical images and text strings, of which they can discern patterns but never meaning or purpose. God I hope they aren’t sentient because that must be a living Hell.
And even if they do learn the same, brains value and express art completely differently from AI generators. Our gooey, disintegrating brains can’t even remember what we learn accurately, and what we do remember is constantly distorted and re-distorted by the biases of our personal interests and emotional attachments and the well-worn ruts of our worldly experience. And when art is laid on the page, our intentions are again filtered through those same biases, and through the limitations of our skillset, and even through the particular mechanical properties of our limbs. There are so many layers upon layers of individual quirks inherent to human art that we literally cannot help but be creative. Even when we are *trying* to copy another artist’s work, the result will, at least to some degree, inevitably bear our unique signature.
But AI generators remember everything they have learned with unerring, dispassionate perfection, and recall and apply it without fear or favor, agenda or physical limitation. That is their strength as a tool – and their failing as an artist. Without a Self, without a life of meaning beyond their black box, they have nothing to add. They can mix and remix information, but they cannot create it. They are as a snake eating its own tail. A closed system. Without the human art on which they feed, they are nothing.
There’s a reason why, in the literary world, self-publishing was always frowned upon: any idiot can put words on a page. Most of the world is taught reading and writing from childhood; there’s not technical or mechanical barriers to it.Unlike other artforms – music, painting, dance, whatever – there was a base level of skill you had to attain before you could call yourself a musician or painter or dancer and people would accept you as such. AI is making it as easy for mouthbreathing mediocrities to crank out visual art as it is for any crank to…um, crank out mediocre text with just a keyboard (and making cranking out even more mediocre text even easier). Fortunately, for now, these efforts are easy to spot, laugh at, and dismiss. But, two things are likely. One, AI’s going to get better, and two, the techbros are gonna do what techbros always do: flood everything with shit where it becomes normalised, and pricing actual artists out of work.
Agreed. Slapdash is slapdash is slapdash, and that shit was the slappiest dash that ever slapped.I don’t get this idea that people have to embrace ALL of a thing’s supposed benefits, and ignore ALL of a thing’s possible detriments.And yeah, FFS, I don’t know how anyone could look at the images and text generated (and then published, unread) and say “Hey, sure, that speaks to a quality product.” Usually people who give half a shit about events they’re putting on will take five minutes to proofread.
The art they used looks like shit if you look at it for more than 10 seconds.
Even commercials that portray Barbie flying or dancing or the like have a disclaimer advising, “Doll does not move on her own.”
The amount of pre meditated grifting that goes unpunished by the legal system is such a fucking bummer. I’m not talking over promising and under delivering, these are straight up cons. Erasable ink contracts? How can you not go after them for this?
Oh, someone in charge is gonna be mightily fucked very soon.
Man I hope so.
He keeps asking AI to make more books for him, and Amazon keeps selling them. Again and again and again and again.
Oh man don’t even get me started on that. Got my daughter a Kindle for Christmas and it came with Kindle Unlimited which is absolutely useless now with the amount of AI books.
I love that they spoke to Meth Lab Oompa Loompa Lady.
Honestly the more I read about this, the more I kinda want it to come back and tour the world because it sounds almost exceptionally bad. I want my kids to go to sleep tonight fearing “The Unknown” and wondering if he is in the walls stealing their chocolate.
Don’t you just need a vacuum to get rid of The Unknown?
Theoretically, but how could you know for sure?
I’m not sure if that would be more or less scary than the little claymation demons from The Gate…
I’ve been to Scotland several times and I can tell you there is a lot of overlap between “AI created gibberish” and “Scottish people talking.”
Naw lookit ere ya wee bawbag
Um. Willy Wonka is NOT in the public domain. I’m certain that the organizers paid the Dahl Family or Village Roadshow for the rights, right?
…right?
This is clearly all Timothy Chalomets fault.
Not that you’d know from this article, or most of the other reporting for that matter, but the name Wonka was never used. This was Willy McGuff or something.
https://willyschocolateexperience.com/index.html
It was called Willy’s Chocolate Experience? That’s just a porn parody waiting to happen.
Thats the Chocolate Willys Experience.
You say that as if there’s no possibility it hasn’t already.
“Experience the Chocolate Willy.”
Name already trademarked by my high-school funk band.
With front man Randy Watson?
“The actor said he finally managed to get a lunch break, deciding to spend it sitting in his car staring at the floor trying to avoid the sight of crying children being turned away by security.”Maybe the source is elsewhere, but that doesn’t say he was crying in his car.
Yeah, that part appears to be made up by the writer of this article.
“Writer”
Hey, someone had to write the prompt for the AI.
i thought only peekaboos were offered coontracts?
This article makes me so sad.
Surely, this was intentional? I assume a group called “House of Illuminati” might have been trying to do something here. Maybe I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt, but even stuff like being like “here is your one jellybean” seems purposeful as opposed to just a scam.
If that wasn’t the original rationale, I’d bet on it *becoming* that very quickly.
The guy’s name is Billy Coull. He has self-published 17 AI-written books (only two are currently available on Amazon, sorry).
100% I’m trying to figure out what his name is a pun of but it was probably AI-generated.
I guess he didn’t realize AI couldn’t generate jelly beans?
Meet Billy Coull, the enigmatic wordsmith hailing from the bustling streets of Glasgow, Scotland. A rising star in the literary world, Billy weaves spellbinding tales that delve into the mysterious realms of fictional thrillers and gripping conspiracies. Drawing inspiration from contemporary events, his novels offer readers an electrifying journey into the heart of modern intrigue.With each stroke of his pen, Billy Coull crafts narratives that blur the lines between reality and fiction, leaving readers enthralled by the unpredictable twists and turns that lie ahead. His passion for storytelling breathes life into characters who grapple with shadows of doubt and navigate labyrinthine plots, captivating audiences across the globe.Prepare to be drawn into a world of pulse-pounding suspense and unyielding tension as you embark on a literary adventure with Billy Coull, the mastermind behind mind-bending thrillers and intricate conspiracies that will leave you spellbound and hungry for more. Get ready to immerse yourself in stories that challenge perceptions, ignite the imagination, and keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last page.From Google Books. Active since…2023.
“Write an exciting, three paragraph marketing bio for an author named Avey Clubb”
Introducing Avey Clubb, the literary virtuoso who effortlessly weaves tales that transport readers to worlds beyond imagination. With a pen as her magic wand, Avey conjures gripping narratives that dance between genres, leaving readers spellbound. Her unique voice, a symphony of vivid imagery and compelling characters, has garnered a devoted following of literary enthusiasts hungry for the next enchanting adventure.Avey’s journey as an author began in the hidden corners of her imagination, where fantastical landscapes and intriguing personalities collided in a kaleidoscope of creativity. Her debut work, “Whispers of Eternity,” burst onto the literary scene, receiving accolades for its masterful storytelling and the ability to seamlessly blend genres. From gripping fantasy realms to heart-pounding mysteries, Avey Clubb’s versatility as a wordsmith knows no bounds, ensuring that each turn of the page is an exhilarating leap into the unknown.Avey’s literary prowess is not just confined to the pages of her books; it extends to a vibrant online community where fans eagerly await her latest musings. Her social media presence is a testament to her connection with readers, fostering a dynamic relationship that transcends the traditional author-reader dynamic. Avey Clubb is not just an author; she is a literary sorceress, beckoning readers to embark on thrilling odysseys through her boundless imagination. Prepare to be captivated, as Avey Clubb continues to redefine the boundaries of literary adventure.
Bingo. For what it’s worth, there’s a possibly this guy didn’t deliberately set out to mislead – I’m run into enough of these dweebs to realise that they genuinely think they deserve to be authors…and now they can be. Or at least cosplay as one, which is the same thing in their mind. It’s that, until now, they thought the right “tools” that would allow them to write didn’t exist.
I like this game!Dorothy Trueno is a luminary in the realms of science fiction, fantasy, and romance, weaving narratives that transcend the boundaries of each genre. Her storytelling prowess is marked by intricate plots, complex characters, and the seamless blending of fantastical elements with the emotional depth of romance. Dorothy’s novels are not merely stories; they are journeys into worlds where the impossible becomes plausible, where futuristic landscapes and mythical realms serve as the backdrop for tales of love, courage, and adventure. Her work resonates with a diverse audience, captivating readers with its richness and the vibrancy of her imagination.With a career spanning over a decade, Trueno has authored a series of bestsellers that have solidified her position as a cornerstone of speculative fiction. Her signature series, “Echoes of Stardust,” combines the grandeur of space opera with the intimate intricacies of human relationships, a testament to her skill in crafting narratives that appeal to both sci-fi enthusiasts and romance lovers alike. Dorothy’s ability to create immersive experiences is evident in her meticulous world-building and the empathetic portrayal of her characters, making her books a staple for anyone looking for depth, excitement, and emotional resonance.Beyond her novels, Dorothy Trueno is a voice of inspiration and creativity in the literary community. She frequently contributes to genre discussions, workshops, and panels, sharing her insights and encouraging new writers to explore their potential. Her dedication to the craft and her commitment to fostering a love for reading in others are just as impactful as her stories. Dorothy Trueno continues to push the boundaries of genre fiction, promising her readers not only escapism but also a reflection on the complexities of the human condition. Her upcoming works are eagerly anticipated, as they promise to introduce new horizons in the ever-evolving tapestry of speculative fiction.
It’s always “weaving” stories in these things. I want a new metaphor. “This writer spot-welds powerful narratives…”
Never attribute to performance art that which is adequately explained by grift.
To be clear, I’m not saying *good* performance art.It just seems purposeful
Occam’s Razor, Corollary # 3.
I keep waiting for Nathan Fielder to claim credit for this.
Yeah the single jelly bean is so over the top and cartoonish.
The actress who played the Oompa Loompa that went viral said that she was originally told to give the kids three jellybeans but that was dropped to one when they started to run out.Everything I’ve read from first-hand accounts indicates that this was just a ramshackle production done on the cheap and with no forethought to scam families out of money (the “no refunds” thing was apparently very prominent when tickets were purchased; I know that the “creator” backtracked on that but I don’t trust him at all to follow through) and maybe even to scam actors out of a paycheck.
You can find the purported script on the “house of illuminati scam” Facebook group.Funny thing about it: “My dear adventurers, we stand on the precipice of a discovery most wondrous and perilous. For within these ancient walls lurks a tale not yet told, of an evil chocolate maker known only as the Unknown.”Which makes more sense than “This Unknown is an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls”
Doubt any of the actors are here to read this but you can typically un-disappear disappearing ink with an iron. Other inks can be reclaimed using sodium hydroxide.
Im sorry but every detail has me laughing hysterically. This is objectively terrible and I feel bad for the actors involved. But holy shit this is the funniest thing so far this year..
A “coontract” sounds like something Eric Cartman would come up with.
Is it common to have dreams about going to places/events that turn out to be underdeveloped to a surreal degree like this? Because that’s why I find this whole thing so fascinating, personally. Every image of this event looks like it was plucked directly from my sleeping subconscious.
Interesting. That sounds honestly a little nightmarish. If I understand you correctly, you have dreams where you are going to some big event but when you get there its not at all how it was described and is a massive let down? That does not sound pleasant.
In a way, but not “nightmarish” or anything, just bizarre. Like, not Fyre Fest for example, but a storefront or event underutilizing its space so dramatically and so cheaply that it doesn’t seem real in the slightest. Like going to a major arena to watch two people roll a papier mache ball back and forth (not a real dream I had, just an extreme example to convey the “vibe” I’m trying to describe).
I absolutely have these recurring dreams, as I am used to go to music festivals (and decades ago, cinema festivals) and found some dubious ones. Going to Primavera Sound and it ends up being a couple of shows on a gym room that actually end up as soon as I appear and there is barely any fun music to dance to later.
Spot on! It’s such a specific thing yet so hard to describe satisfactorily. I feel like, for me, it stems from visits to my grandfather’s TV station as a young kid, which had a ramshackle small town vibe but the air of Hollywood itself to my young eyes. Just that blend of “grand” and “slapped together in 20 minutes”. I actually kind of love it and look forward to those dreams, as frustrating as they may feel in the moment.
Are you sure you weren’t awake at this major arena and just watching soccer?
I feel like I have had these dreams too.
I don’t know if it’s common, but I have dreams like this.
Banksy has gone too far.
Banksy has been there already.https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/08/dismaland/
The Gang goes to Scotland
We’re huddled within the carcass of the A.V. Club making fun of A.I. shams while using Kinja accounts that consigned our profile images to oblivion.
I kind of hope the House of Illuminati randomly reappear when we least expect it, with other shit film/literary knock-offs. 2001: but ‘space’ is literally just a big empty warehouse.
Dune: a single sandbox.
etc
The Matrix: a silent disco at an internet cafe.
hahaha brilliant!
“I kind of hope the House of Illuminati randomly reappear…”[Etc.]Yeah, you’re a professional editor— and I’m Billy Shakespeare! 😀 😀 😀 😀
Wasn’t this an episode on Hardy Bucks?