Willy Wonka event leaves bitter taste with artificially sweetened promises In the most flagrant case of false advertising since The NeverEnding Story, cops were called to a Wonka-themed "Willy's Chocolate Experience" in Glasgow, Scotland, because promotional material was made entirely from AI-generated slop. "INDULGE IN A CHOCOLATE FANTASY LIKE NEVER BEFORE – CAPTURE THE ENCHANTMENT™" the website …
Given the Wonka actor said they had been given nonsensical scripts to learn at the last minute and even his contract looked like nonsense, and that the organiser's "apology" was that "multiple suppliers had let us down at the last minute", i wonder if those suppliers had also been given AI-generated nonsense specifications at the last minute too..
I.e. it sounds like some knobhead thought "what if we get AI to design and organise an event all on its own with minimal input from ourselves", and sell tickets at £35 each, not giving a shit about the psychological effect on customers (kids) and contractors..
Perhaps not everything: replacing politicians by generative AI might be a step in the right direction. Instead of the expense of holding elections we could simply have AI predict the results. The danger of self driving cars will be a thing of the past. No-one will have to drive to work because their job will be done by AI. So what if people starve when AI farmers irrigate with Brawndo. Their social media accounts can be maintained by AI and who would know the difference?
I recently went to a live concert of music from Lord of the Rings et al.
The concert in itself was quite good: great musicians in the orchestra, a choir and epic music.
What's not to like?
However ...
Above the orchestra, there was a row of three screens onto which stuff was projected.
This stuff was live footage from selected musicians via some GoPros or similar camera distributed over the stage.
Apart from some noticeable lag, that wasn't too bad or distracting.
But, in addition there were animations.
My guess is, they asked some generative AI to generate some scenes inspired by Lord of the Rings et al. in order to avoid having to fork out cash for licensing stills or even sequences from the movies.
Avoiding throwing good money into the black pits of big studio accounts is always a good idea.
However, I would have preferred if they had just dropped the whole "let's show animations" idea.
I'm in a few musical performance Facebook groups and there's been a few mentions and gnashings of teeth about some of these movie themed musical concerts.
Best I can come up with right now is this page from Howard Shore warning about knock-off concerts: https://howardshore.com/notice-unofficial-concerts/
I think the musicians were complaining about not getting paid after performing in the bootleg ones (which they didn't necessarily know weren't official until afterwards).
Yes, that was one of them.
On the other hand, the music is out there. So, as long as royalties are paid to the original composer, everybody is free to perform the music. On the other-other hand, I am not a lawyer.
The thing that bugged me, was the reference to a specific set of movies and then showing visuals that are more at home in some '90s or '00s fantasy RPG.
And so it begins – the absolute dumbing down and worsening of everything from media to film to advertising to politics to the written word at the dead hands of AI, stoked by venture capitalists' rabid faith that it will be some sort of productivity silver bullet.
I think "it" began some time ago. Everything.... politics, education, products... all have been dumbed down for some time. So what is "beginning"?? Enquiring minds and all thaqt.
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It was ridiculous. Public website found somewhere. Three questions. First two fairly open ended and without depth. Answers were entertaining. Not much space for failure there. Last one was a technical question. Answer was completely meaningless. Took first part of my prompt as a title of sort and generated some unrelated procedure about the rest.
ML has not being instructed to tell: “I don’t know this subject.”. I doubt it will ever learn to do so. It takes intelligence.
The only practical use-case I have found for it so far is generating large amounts of generic text in roughly the right size and shape for test data.
Hard to see how that's going to justify the amount they're spending on it. In fact if it stole all the income from every freelance artist and writer it still wouldn't come close to the amount they are spending on it. Very hard to see where they imagine the profit is going to come from.
In an age when AI-based grifting grows ever easier, I can't help but wonder why one would go for this incredibly baroque approach. It clearly is a con and nobody will see their money again, but it's so complicated and awkward to hire a warehouse and actors and a handful of lacklustre props and set up the whole thing as though it is a real production. It's so high-profile and weird.
It's hard to imagine why someone would choose this, from the world of possible scams available to them.
The AI images thing is not as stupid as it looks, though - a little like misspelt spam messages, bad AI advertising can operate like a filter that eliminates the less gullible, allowing the scammer to identify vulnerable marks more easily.
Adds Wonko Experience to Fyre Festival and Dash Con grift pile.
I don't get all the work that was done on each of these grifts to just quarter-ass something to the public at the end.
I mean, computers are supposed to make it easier to grift.
/my AI kingdom for a ball pit
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