Willy's Chocolate Experience was an unlicensed event based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that took place in Glasgow, Scotland, in February 2024, and gained worldwide notoriety for its poor execution. [...] The event was advertised as an immersive and interactive family experience, illustrated on a promotional website with "dreamlike" AI-generated imagery.
Curated from nbcnews.com · 27 February 2024 →
Families paid around 35 pounds a ticket for the event the promotional images showed, and arrived at a sparsely decorated warehouse where actors had been handed an incoherent script and improvised. Police were called. The organiser apologised and refunded ticket holders. The images themselves are the case: generated from a description of a thing that did not exist, complete with invented words on the signage, and good enough that hundreds of people made travel plans around them. What used to require building the thing, or at least photographing something, now requires a sentence. It is the cheapest and most ordinary version of a problem the deepfake cases further down this page describe at the other end of the scale.
