Wally Wönker’s AI Scam Horror Experience

"Do not expect to buy / In the 24th century"

– ari eckols, 10 POEMS RUTHLESSLY MANGLED BY GOOGLE TRANSLATE, p. 12

"Children are literally torn apart or explode leaving entrails on their parents,

and Wonka responds with jokes and banter."

- Zoe Bee, Willy Wonka: Capitalism for Kids!, TC: 00:23:28-00:23:38

🍬 🍬 🍬 🍬 🍬

Enchrrining Emttarrrmnnt!

Willly Wonnka Won!

Henlo childrün! I am Warlllety Wonkk, seeker of the belly button! Inspired by the marvellous magic of the recent 2024 Willy Wonka immersive experience AI scam, I hereby proudly present to you a digital-virtual 3D environment bringing the wönky experience to your screen for the first time, and imagining it further beyond the original, making it more original than the original! Now your kids can relive their worst Glasgow childhood memory – in the future, this game experience may even be used in trauma therapy! This is a AAAA game! An experience that fills in the gaps of the horrors that online spectators have seen, with multiple endings ("Congrats, you’ve been scammed!", "YOU WON", "a kind of primordial abyss" and the lemon ending)! We all have heard the news - now you know what really happend there, and can step right into it! An experience of encherining entertainment, featuring catgacating, live performances, cartchy tuns, exarserdray lollipops, and a pasadise of sweet teats! But alas, lurking in the shadows, a specter known as The Unknown casts a sinister shadow upon our reverie, a dark force intent on subverting the very essence of what we hold dear! Beware of The Unknown that lives inside a mirror!

Wally Wönker’s AI Scam Horror Experience provides horrific joy for all ages, and especially to toddlers! Everything from the original experience is here: Being scammed with AI-generated images, being scammed with a nearly empty hall, being scammed with one jelly bean, being scammed with a shot of lemonade, being scammed with Eempa Lempos operating a meth lab, all framed with wonderful AI-generated art! This version has more candy than the original! This unforgettable experience was asset-flipped, text copied and AI-voiced together between February 29th and March 6th/7th 2024! As CEO of the Hen of Illushmindnaughty I love injecting cartchy capitalist teats right into your very tuns!

What do you think about the issue? You did it? Let us all know in the comments below!

starring the world famous actors

Luka Frӕya Friedland as Waltraud "Wally" Wönker, Girlboss of the Chocolate Factory

Tiffany-Dorothy Giggle Chaléeameth Junior as the AI Voice of the Eempa Lempos

Herbert K. as the AI Voice of The Unknown

Disclaimer: The Naughty Hen doesn’t cattagachactinse for any occuring exarmersdresdy.

WE WONKA OF BECOME

🍬 🍬 🍬 🍬 🍬

This has been quite some work for a silly meme that we all are probably very tired of seeing by now. But I hope I have been able to add something unique and new to it. I usually do not like to jump onto trending topics or discourse, but it is justifiable to me here to bend this rule, because the last days I was both shocked and in laughter at this sad and disastrous event. I thought that someone should really turn this thing into a video game environment to walk around in, as it kind of is, judging by the viral images and text descriptions and video material, a post-Brechtian theatrical space that continously illusion-breaks and meta-comments itself, as well as a space of eerie liminality. I’ve probably put way too much work into this project, way more than the event organizer of the original did. (On an interesting side-note, here I see the vibe I was going for while designing the abandoned amusement park of ich sage flüssig, a vibe of an abandoned commerical environment that is yet still haunted by capitalism in a strange way, fulfilled.) (It was a bit hard to wrap my head around the architecture of this hall, and to try to reconstruct it a little bit from photos, piecing it together from different angles. Here are the visual reference materials linked: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7][8] [9] [10] [11].

It is a bit of a deranged fever dream nonetheless. Still, I hope that I came a bit close to the reality of it, despite not aiming for 100% "realistic" accuracy. The step from immersive theatre to videogames of course being, both in my view and based in research, a small one. Of course, Guy Debord’s concept of the capitalist (society of the) spectacle comes to mind too. (And I've borrowed the descriptor "artificial hell" from Claire Bishop.) I think that here, in all of the layers to this scam as outlined by the news articles and so on, we can really see the consequences of profit-driven use of AI to produce soulless, cold, meaningless and empty art as content and profitable product – because empty shells is all there really are if one cancels the human element out of the creation of art. By working with some of the news articles I’ve read on this whole thing, rearranging and zerfasern them with the help of online tools, together with AI and under my own conceptual direction, I might uncover some hidden threads – and treats and teats – of poetic bliss.

At the same time, pointing to my little thoughts on aesthetics and ableism, I would like to add that by itself the presented immersive theatre environment would be aesthetically valid in my view, but the precisely fact that it was deliberately falsely advertised with the obvious intention to trick hundreds of people into buying a ticket as well as the apparent lack of love and artistic conceptual idea make it a hugely problematic endeavour to be rightfully criticized in reference to the use of AI for art production under capitalism. There is another argument that could be made, which is that the organizer had to aesthetically please preconcieved/expected normative capitalist audience expectations in advertising, because the aesthetics wouldn’t have pleased people, but, considering the aforementioned and evidence-backed lack of artistic love as well as the previous AI projects of the organizer, one must condemn the lack of moral integrity on part of the organizer and thus shouldn’t entirely shift the blame onto overarching structural issues of capitalism, althought they surely are always at play too.

To me, a collaborative effort with some support of AI is alright – for example, when I am translating my texts and thoughts into language that culturally dominates the world (no, not Volapük; no, not Esperanto; but English) or when writing some passages or when encountering some words that I don’t know, I usually use DeepL, and thus already do use AI as a helpful tool since before the recent AI hype. When people would then suggest that I should hire a translator for every little thing, I would answer with: "Okay, rich kid?!". I’ve written elsewhere about digital games that "from a media scientific point of view, media is first and foremost neutral, as it literally just mediates" (Luka*s Friedland, The Impossibility of Resurrecting Hundreds of Dead Animals, p. 6, emphasis in italics in the original) – AI definitely challenges this supposed neutrality, but I still think this applies to AI too, because it totally depends on what the user does with it.

🍬 🍬 🍬 🍬 🍬

As an introduction and contextualising mood-setting, I am using a quote from Zoe Bee's video Willy Wonka: Capitalism for Kids! as well as from Stephanie Sterling's video The A.I. Tech Fad Is Just Compulsively Shady (The Jimquisition).

The Eempa Lempos are voiced by the AI voice Mia, and The Unknown is voiced by the AI voice David from TTSMaker. The final monologue that Wally Wönker speaks with the monobloc chair and so on was generated using the AI Text Generator by DeepAI. This project also uses a recording from Giacomo Miceli’s fascinating conceptual project The Infinite Conversation between AI resembling Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek.

The Unknown was made using MakeHuman and Mixamo. Lots of additional models for The Unknown as well as the whole environment via sketchfab as credited in the game.

The images as backgrounds on the walls as well as one of the shitty courtain cloth motifs and the Game Over images as well as those appearing on the main menu upon reaching an ending were AI-generated using DreamStudio. Additional CC0 images via pixabay, pxhere and pexels, CC0 soundfiles via freesound.org.

The text that I as Wally Wönker am speaking through the loudspeakers is the same text that the Wonka-actor had to perform and that is embedded as a PDF in James’ DailyMail article below. According to the actor and the articles as well as checked by me using GPTZero, it was entirely written by AI.

The text material that the Eempa Lempos, exploited and enslaved workers, and The Unknown are/is saying was produced by a method similar to ari eckols’ 2013 publication 10 POEMS RUTHLESSLY MANGLED BY GOOGLE TRANSLATE by running several articles covering the event through several randomly selected languages with google translate (English to German to Aymara to Maori to Italian & back to English). Additionally, the articles where processed using Hannes Bajohr’s automatengedichtautomat. (Both eckols’ text as well as Bajohr’s tool were brought to my attention way back around 2017 during my formative years of creative writing education at the German literature organization wortbau e.V. at workshops with my mentor at that time, Rudi Nuss, and have been of great use and inspiration several times afterwards, so thanks to them! (Way better and more helpful and motivating than any creative writing study program at universitys ever was to me.))

The articles used for the text generation are the following:

Adams, Abigail (2024): Actor Hired for Disastrous Willy Wonka Experience Feels Scammed: ‘The Whole Thing Was Disrespectful'. In: www.people.com. URL: https://people.com/actor-hired-for-disastrous-willy-wonka-experience-feels-scamm... [29.02.2024, 22:50].

Downer, Adam (2024): What Was The Sad Glasgow 'Willy Wonka Experience' And Who's 'Billy Coull'? The Disastrous Event Explained. In: www.knowyourmeme.com. URL: https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-was-the-sad-glasgow-willy-wonka-... [29.02.2024, 23:03].

James, John (2024): The face behind Willy Wonka 'scam': How Billy Coull 'conned' kids by using AI generated images to sell 'immersive' experience, sold Chat-GPT authored novels on Amazon, and faced backlash for cancelling Santa grotto. In: www.dailymail.co.uk. URL: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13131481/The-face-Willy-Wonka-scam-Bill... [29.02.2024, 22:56].

Jaseliūnas, Larsas and Zukas, Dominykas (2024): Terrible Willy Wonka ‘Immersive Chocolate Experience’ Makes People Chuckle After Pics Go Viral. In: www.boredpanda.com. URL: https://www.boredpanda.com/willy-wonka-experience-catastrophe/ [29.02.2024, 23:06].

Klee, Miles (2024): Huckster Behind ‘Willy Wonka’ Event Also Sells AI-Written Vaccine Conspiracy Books. In: www.rollingstone.com. URL: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/willy-wonka-event-glasgow-... [29.02.2024, 22:54].