Willy Wonka and the AI Marketing Experience
And why this is a entrepreneur problem
In the summer of 1956, a workshop took place at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. A small group of mathematicians and scientists came together for the founding event of artificial intelligence. That kickstarted 68 years of innovation, from the Logic Theorist program written that same year - the first program deliberately created to perform automated reasoning - through IBM’s Deep Blue defeating Garry Kasparov through to the excitement generated by modern-day innovations that offer a tantalizing glimpse of a future without disease where we travel to the stars. It’s been quite a ride. And that ride has, finally, brought us to the natural endpoint of humanity’s desire for innovation: Glasgow’s Box Hub Warehouse:
If you live a blessed life free of the burden of being Very Online you may not recognize this image. Believe me when I say this is a vanishingly rare example of a moment where it pays to spend a lot of time scrolling your phone. The above, AI-generated, image is from the promotional material for ‘Willy’s Chocolate Experience’ a place where ’chocolate dreams become reality’. This almost-certainly-not-licensed-through-Roald-Dahl’s-estate event has gone super viral since it angered parents and baffled children at the weekend. And like Fyre Festival and DashCon it will enter the pantheon of Events So Shit The Police Were Called. If you haven’t encountered the videos yet, I would encourage you to do so. Here’s a sample:
You can watch more footage here, there’s an entire rabbit hole of content to tumble down, from the ‘chocolate river’ to the poor Wonka actor giving background details on the disaster.
But this is an AI newsletter so we will focus on AI. The promo poster above contains the gibberish text associated with AI content, all the promotional material has that hyper-stylized look of something that was quickly churned out by a text-to-image tool.
Then there’s the script handed out to the actors:
A favorite line is where the script explains that the audience will react with wonder and excitement. Extracts of the 15-page script, that reads as completely AI-generated, have been floating about on social in recent days.
The AI element of the whole fiasco has featured in much of the reporting. Rolling Stone has a good run-through of the various AI-related projects the organizer, Billy Coull, has been involved with. He published 16 books on Amazon last summer, some on the same day.
The AI angle is fair. Given the half-assed nature of the whole enterprise, it’s possible it would not have taken place if the organizer needed to pay for promo materials or a scriptwriter.
But some reaction made AI the main focus on the story, Willy Wonka fiasco highlights risks of AI-made ads ran a sober headline from Ben Smith’s Semafor. AI made this scam slightly easier to get started. But the focus of the story is that somebody, either through ignorance or arrogance, did not seem to care that this pitch:
Was very different from this reality:
The organizer is not the first person to engage with generative AI and get dollar signs in his eyes. He is the first high-profile example of someone not seeing the disconnect between easily generated AI spitballing and real-life delivery.
There are lots of risk posed by AI ads, this story feels a bit more about the risks posed by entrepreneurs.
Small bits #1 Google, Gen AI and News
Adweek have a good exclusive on a program Google are running where small news publishers publish a set number of stories using an ‘unrelased generative AI platform. A Google spokesperson said, “The experimental tool is being responsibly designed to help small, local publishers produce high quality journalism using factual content from public data sources... These tools are not intended to, and cannot, replace the essential role journalists have in reporting, creating and fact-checking their articles.”
There are a few takeaways from this story:
If the Google pitch is correct, that’s probably fine
It would just be preferable if that functionality was directly controlled by each newsroom
Because of harsh lessons learned by The Great Pivot to Video of 2015 absolutely nobody in journalism believes a pitch coming from Big Tech
Because of a number of depressing factors, including The Great Pivot to Video of 2015, small publishers will still take the five figure (five figure 😬) payment from Google despite not believing the pitch
Small bits #2: New creative AI thing that creatives hate just dropped
Because it’s a day of the week ending in y there is a new AI thing going viral that is seemingly solely designed to annoy creatives. Today it’s DJ Mode from Google Music FX beta. As is common with these things the tech is kind of interesting and the tool itself, where you insert lots of different genres and prompts to produce weird little mashups, is a fun distraction. But the pitch , “It’s an infinite AI jam that you control 🎛️. Try mixing your unique 🌀 of instruments, genres, or favorite foods” has understandbly left musicians, or even just people who like music, asking ‘but why?‘