This was one of the best reads I’ve had in a long time. Clicking the links to related articles is highly recommended.
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?
I like the rolling stone article where he also sells AI generated vaccine conspiracy books.
Is Blaming-the-AI killing off the Blaming-the-Intern industry???
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.
Problem is, even when we get over this shit and hire the “creatives” back, they won’t be getting the same wages.
And a lot of the money that could go to the artists is going to go to these silicone valley pricks, too. Never think for a second the people making AI like this don’t appreciate what they’re doing. This shit is custom built to steal the livelihood from artists and put it directly into their own pockets.
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.
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.
Exactly. Whatever happened to, blame the artist not the tools?
They didn’t even proof read the promotional flyers to make sure they made sense. It’s an absolutely absurd level of laziness.
You’re describing AI. We are in the get rich quick period of AI usage.
No, we’re describing a human endeavour. If the promotional flyers had been made by outsourcing it to Fiverr and they came back wonky it would have been the same basic problem. They outsourced this and then ether didn’t have the resources or interest in checking the work that came back.
Yeah, this is just people misapplying the AI tools we are given. They’re not close to General AI, you certainly can’t expect them to do all the work for you yet.
It’s gonna be the new Dot Com bubble. Sure, we’ll have to deal with this nonsense for another year or two, but once it gets to the point of insanity/critical mass hopefully that’s when people stop throwing AI at everything.
I see ads all around my city for the new Galaxy S24, it looks the exact same as my S23, and probably has the same hardware, mostly, but their new selling point is that it comes with AI. That’s literally the only thing on the billboard.
You cannot automate human creativity
Yet
I know people don’t read articles, but at least scroll down to the picture of “an Oompa Loompa running a meth lab”
The look in that poor girls eyes
I think she already knows she’s not being paid.
Just like her script being created by a AI. The money they are going to pay her in is made by AI.
Speaking to MailOnline, she confirmed that not only had she not been paid she also hadn’t been briefed on what her role would involve. She explained: ‘I was angry at the time because I felt like this is embarrassing for me, and I felt bad for the people coming in as well. I actually ended up shouting at the guy. I just said to him he’s a joke and this is like embarrassing, and how can we basically live with himself, doing this to people. This is really embarrassing for me. My job is teaching kids yoga and I go into schools and stuff and I do kids’ entertainment. This is none of our faults at all. We got the job and then we got given the script. By that point I’d signed a contract and they said they were going to put us £500 for the two days which is a lot of money which is a lot of money to say no to.’
I saw the meme yesterday before I knew about this and was confused haha
lmao
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
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.
I mean the event organizer was there to have the doors open (of course the person was flanked by two bouncers). So it isn’t like the worker even if they wanted to could stop it. I’m sure those bouncers could’ve been turned on her like they were the parents asking for refunds. (Source)
It’s one of those meth labs where the t is silent.
what if i told you:
not all chemistry is for making meth?Yes chemistry is for turning paint thinner into cherry soda (my only exposure to chemistry is nilered)
Look at that face and tell me they don’t at least wish they were making stims.
True.
You can also make LSD.
I feel like I’m reading a conversation between Walter White and Walter Bishop here.
Hah! I understood both of those references.
not with that setup…
I had no context when I first saw this image and assumed it was something drug related.
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.
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
Ick. To a very specific audience - prop makers - that $30 is a great deal to get up close looks at costumes and props whose details don’t always show up on screen.
Sucks if they advertised it as more, though.
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.
I get the feeling that most of these "experience’ things I’ve been hearing about lately are low effort cash grabs.
From what I understand the Jurassic world one was actually really good and they put in the effort
From what I understand the Jurassic world one was actually really good and they put in the effort
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…
I almost never click a video by someone I don’t know these days. It’s almost always a waste of time.
I’ve recently been using the home page on YT (in addition to my bookmark, which takes me straight to /feed/subscriptions) and I’ve been pleasantly surprised. It seems like the algorithm is generally pretty good at finding similar videos to the ones I enjoy. That is unless I scroll waaaaay down, where it just runs out of ideas. I would recommend trying out your home page, with some light pruning as needed (“Not interested”, “Don’t recommend channel”).
Yup. I think the worst offenders are the videos that are just Wikipedia pages with still images and an AI text-to-speech robot voice. It’s the world’s laziest form of “content creation” and I always downvote them.
Same here, generally, but I think there are a tiny few people who have a legitimate reason for using TTS. For instance, those whose English skills are lacking, or who have an accent which some might find distracting. Or a person who is self-conscious about their voice but still has something to offer, or maybe those who legitimately can’t speak at all. Hell, I support anyone who could narrate but doesn’t want to put their voice out there for privacy reasons, or to keep it out of the public space where it will inevitably be used as training data.
I’d still rather listen to the human, because I can’t stand any of the “AI” voices, especially those that are used on every fucking tiktok (I stay away from TT, but unfortunately the voices are pretty ubiquitous). It might sound silly but I’d prefer good old Microsoft Sam to the any of these new voices.
One channel I found recently for coding-related topics uses TTS but before I got annoyed enough to close it, I realized that the script was probably hand-written, just narrated by a machine. The video was highly informative, and I walked away having learned some new information. For the curious
Something that sucks about this new wave of TTS is that we get some odd errors in pronunciation that probably wouldn’t be there if it was spoken by a human. A missing comma or other punctuation errors will pass a spell check but end up sounding really strange due to the broken inflection. Uncanny Valley stuff I suppose.
AI thumbnails are utter garbage though. All polish, no substance, no love for the craft.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
duped unsuspecting parents into bringing their kids to a truly dmsial event using clearly AI-generated marketing materials.
Said the AI generated article.
would AI spell “dismal” wrong?
If you told it to include human like errors yeah
I’m not even sure a person would spell it that wrong.
I’m sure little weasel Billy Coull is hiding out until things cool off then he’ll be back out fucking over people again. Hopefully the workers run scumbag Billy out of town if they’re not paid.
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!
You get a silver star for trying. This article is just too much for AI to re-write.
The only way this would have worked is if everyone had been given a little tab of lsd.
They only had enough in their budget to give LSD to all the organizers
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?
Hey now! Having an AI generate a Willy Wonka live production is part of getting the certification in some territories!
Please let this Willy Wonka warehouse extra teach you about how to be business savvy.
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.
So avant garde! Oh my!
Am I supposed to be mad at these small time
con-mencapitalists? 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.Why are you harassing these glorious, aspiring job creators acting in rational self-interest?
We went to Japan last year and they have a fast food chain called MOS burger. The food looked exactly like the menu pictures… It was amazing! Plump and delicious.
Yes. Yes you are.
Our society is long overdue giving con men the ass kicking they deserve.
Can we start with the con-men hurting/exploiting millions and threatening billions with their “externalities,” capitalist Orwellian shorthand for “I already have your money, so my mess is your problem you stupid fucking suckers 🤑🖕?”
Because these bottom feeders are just a symptom of the above’s global sociocultural damage. They ruined some kids afternoon. It might be cathartic to kkck their ass, but it’s odd considering how comfortable we are with our most prolific con-men being allowed to own, and keep!.. every exploited, scammed dollar, instead kicking their ass as you say.
Consistency is important.
I agree. We need a new saying that parallels “One death is a tragedy, one million deaths are a statistic.”
Fair enough
Back to the days of running the snake oil salesmen out of town tarred and feathered?
What? They didn’t slightly miscalculate the minimum, they grossly blasted past it. Yes, your point is that false advertising is a spectrum, and a certain amount is generally expected, but this isn’t in some mushy grey area of it, it’s egregiously over the line. Yeah food doesn’t look like it does on the packages, but if this event were food it would be a grey goop. Frankly I find your attempt at ignoring magnitude lazy, sloppy, and cynical.
Lol magnitude? Really? These microcapitalists ruined these kids afternoon with their scam, while while the ones these scammers emulate poison them with microplastics and Threaten their ONLY habitat, to the scam shareholder’s applause and most of society considering them aspirational figures, buying the scam of “sometimes companies make a mess, it isn’t their problem or responsibility, and we call this competely valid economic event an externality herp derp 🤡.”
Also Most of corporate run INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY EXPERIENCE exhibitions are only one step up from this in terms of marketing vs reality. They calculated the formula of acceptable
customermark dissatisfaction correctly.So please, do continue telling me more about the magnitude of these microcapitalist’s microscam.
sits in Wonka meme pose.
Moist Critikal’s video on this was a banger
Searched for it on YouTube, but there’s so many remixes and reaction videos and reposts and other bullshit that I honestly am not sure I found the right one.
Is this it?
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.
Apparently they were given the script only a day before. And on the day of, they were told to just let people walk through, and improvise. Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/galleries/article-13134989/Embarrassed-Oompa-Loompas-actresses-Wonka-scam-talks.html
What a shame. The set pieces look great, but obviously look out of place on a concrete floor. I feel bad for all the actors involved.
Which srt pieces look great? All the ones I’ve seen so far look like shit.
Or, well, neighborhood Halloween party-level at best.
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
