The Wonka Fiasco is a Story about AI

(Image Credit, Markus Spiske, Unsplash)

Last week, an event was held in Glasgow called the ‘Willy’s Chocolate Experience’. For £35 a ticket, guests were promised a “chocolate fantasy like never before”, but were inste-Actually, who am I kidding? You definitely know this story already.

We’ve all seen it. The depressing, dingy warehouse, the half empty cups of lemonade, the sparse candy-cane props, and, of course, the existentially tortured Oompa Loompa. This thing exploded online. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, the news, all of society set aside their differences and came together to collectively mock this sham event. “What is that? It’s the Unknown!” became a beloved and much-repeated catchphrase in workplaces the world over.

All for good reason. The event wasn’t just funny, it was a pretty gross bait-and-switch scam made to trick unassuming parents into forking over a fairly significant chuck of their disposable income towards an event that was strung together in the laziest way possible. The text on the website, the characters, the promotional images, all of it was cobbled together from ChatGPT and DeepAI. Hell, even the event organisers’ apology following the incident looks to be written by ChatGPT. (Anyone else desperate to know what the prompt was?)  Readily available image AI generators struggle to create images with cohesive words and text. This is why when you go on the website, you’ll see posters proudly selling “cartchy tuns”, “catgacating”, and, who can forget, “exersady lollipops”.

The sudden rise of AI has been met with a mix of amazement and concern. The technology itself is definitely impressive; OpenAI’s latest model, Sora, can create vivid, life-like videos from simple prompts. But as anyone who’s seen Jurassic Park recently will be quick to ask, have we been too caught up in whether or not we could instead of thinking if we should? What are the future implications of this technology? Could this spawn an even worse form of disinformation in a political climate where truth is already a vulnerable resource? Could this put thousands of people out of work?

One of the groups who have voiced their concerns the loudest are the creatives: those who write original text and create original artwork for a living. Last year saw one of the most disruptive creative strikes in history when members of Hollywood’s screenwriters union, the WGA, withdrew their labour after studios expressed interest in AI generating film and TV scripts over the more expensive option of paying human writers. The move makes sense I suppose. Why would I want to see a movie with the complex and epic storytelling of Christopher Nolan, or the feminist coming-of-age drama of Greta Gerwig, when instead I can watch a computer stumble its way through a plot just so a studio executive can save the $12 and Happy Meal toy it would’ve cost to pay someone with an innate understanding of the human experience? Visual artists have felt the most brutal hit from AI image generation. Not only have major studios been caught using AI in their marketing material, image generators like DeepAI are trained using existing work by human artists. Their works were fed into DeepAI’s training algorithm without their approval.

In a way, the over-reliance on AI is what made the Wonka event as horrible as it was. Parents were led to believe they were paying for a wholesome, enthralling experience, but were met with a shoddy mess thrown together by people who were simply too lazy or creatively bankrupt to put the real work in. There’s been a rising belief amongst some that AI will effectively eliminate the need for real creatives. Movie studios were ecstatic at the prospect of films costing nothing to produce and guaranteeing pure profit, and the organisers of the Wonka event clearly thought feeding a few prompts into ChatGPT and DeepAI was enough to avoid putting in the effort and know-how required to properly conceptualise an event such as this. But AI still cannot make good art and will always falter when compared to the real thing.

The response has been the perfect demonstration of this. As details of the event poured in online, users experienced a myriad of genuinely funny memes satirising the event and its terribly ill-fitting characters. Some users hilariously compared the event to an ‘Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ situation and joked about Kate Middleton’s supposed involvement. But the people who deserve real recognition are the artists. The characters may have been AI generated, but artists got to work giving them their own unique spin while showing off their artistic merit. They imagined The Unknown as a monster found in a Nintendo-64 video game, or as drawn by Roald Dahl illustrator, Quentin Blake. The depressed Oompa Loopa was given an 16-bit retro look, and went out for a smoke break.

An inauthentic AI hack-job actually managed to kickstart an abundance of human creativity.

As impressive as AI is becoming, it’s clear that it can be exploited by those who see art less as a genuine form of human expression, created by skilled people, but rather as a tool that's required to extract money from pockets. These people don’t understand the depth of knowledge and talent that's required to create great stories, memorable characters, mesmerising artwork, and captivating adventures. If they continue to fail in recognising the value of human artists, the Glasgow Wonka fiasco will only be the first in a series of endeavours that simply miss the trick of creating genuine human experiences.