Imagine being Scottish. Ouch. My Scottish suitemate speaks of a land where the sun appears only three times a year and the shrill squall of bagpipes echoes through a neverending fog. But there was a brief glimmer of hope for the Scottish people when, in December of 2023, the Glasgow-based event company House of Illuminati (name inexplicable) announced the opening of “Willy’s Chocolate Experience,” an event sure to bring wonder and excitement to a place so lacking in it.
The resulting “experience” will now go down in history as among the most unfortunate events to befall the region, narrowly beaten out by the election of Margaret Thatcher. Expecting to find an immersive Willy Wonka experience, children and their parents were instead given a near-empty warehouse intermittently scattered with Wonka-themed props and underpaid actors. Far from enchanting, pictures from the event suggest a liminal hellscape or perhaps an underfunded highschool prom with a theme like “A Night in the Chocolate Factory” or “A Dance with Charlie.”
The promotional website for the experience, willyschocolateexperience.com, is a sugar-coated psychedelic abyss. It consists solely of AI generated content that sidesteps concrete details and intellectual property laws. For example, the “Twilight TunnelTM” segment of the experience advertises “captivating projections, enigmatic sounds, and surprising turns” while the promised entertainment entices us with “charming characters singing original catchy tunes.” The accompanying images depict larger-than-life lollipops and jellybeans, but also indeterminate, grotesque objects wavering between creature and candy. The image accompanying the “Captivating Entertainment” makes an attempt at text, but ultimately comes off as if the AI were speaking from the depths of a K-hole. Mangled letterforms fall together to advertise “Cartchy tuns,” “exarserdray lollipops,” and, rather raunchily for such a young audience, “a pasadise of sweet teats.”
The event certainly fell short of its £35 price tag and the expectations of those who wanted a “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” experience. Although, in one way, it went beyond what anyone could’ve expected. The script for the event, also produced by a Large Language Model, includes an original character referred to only as The Unknown, the unspeakably evil arch-nemesis of Willy Wonka. At the event, The Unknown was not quite the intimidating specter outlined on paper. Played by an actor clad in a silver mask, black tunic, and an unruly wig, The Unknown kneeled behind a mirror and then lurched out to strike spooky poses at passersby. In hindsight, the mirror is a weighty symbolic gesture. In it, the viewer could see their sobering reflection and confront the true unknown, namely, “Why the fuck did I pay £35 for this?”
The quintessential image to emerge from this fiasco is that of a dejected actor in an Oompa Loompa costume. She stands in the ghostly fog of a haunted house smoke machine. Before her are the jumbled components of a prop chemistry set. She stares at nothing. This image is also a mirror. We are alone in our atomized culture, clouded by confusion and forced to wear the garbs of counterfeit identities—cheap, polyester, Party City renditions of who we believe we are. The set pieces we’ve surrounded ourselves with appear sparse, ridiculous, and cruel in such a cold and empty room.
While news outlets have rushed to interview the actors and the organizer behind the event, what’s self-evident is how little human involvement there actually was. The entire experience was an AI-generated, aped phantasia to be played out by reluctant actors among the faux-whimsy of foam readymades.
A common fear is that generative AI will rapidly outpace human artistic production, creating technically perfect, art on-demand that is nonetheless lacking in soul. The tragicomic failure of “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” indicates that this possibility is still distant, but it also points towards a more grim contemporary reality. “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” was an abject failure and a con, but without the all-too-human charm these farces can inspire. Although technological society has yet to make human brilliance obsolete, it has nonetheless succeeded in sterilizing something more essential to our being: our failure.