The Wonka Experience Disaster Was AI's Fyre Fest

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. A guy named Billy uses slick marketing and buzzy new tech to sell tickets to a hype-fueled event. But when attendees get there, it turns out it was all a mirage — a dismal gathering in a filthy environment, complete with substandard food. The world watches in horror and fascination as the whole mess unfolds on social media. Strikingly, it’s a description that applies just as well to 2017’s infamous Fyre Fest, in which revelers expecting a glitzy music festival ended up stranded in FEMA-like conditions, as to this week’s “Willy’s Chocolate Experience,” an “immersive” event based on Willy Wonka that was drummed up with AI-generated text and video, but which was so disappointing in reality that children burst into tears and their parents called the police. Incredibly, they were even both run by men named Billy: Fyre Fest was the brainchild of Billy McFarland, and the Wonka Experience the creation of a guy named Billy Coull. The internet was quick to connect the two events. “Need a Fyre Fest-style documentary about the immersive Willy Wonka exhibit in Glasgow so badly,” one X-formerly-Twitter user wrote. “They tried to Fyre Fest Willy Wonka,” another posted. The more you think about it, the deeper the similarities run. Fyre Fest was a spinoff of McFarland’s Uber-like app for booking celebrity talent, and he leveraged the then-buzzy notion of paying influencers to promote it on social media. And as he would later admit to UK tabloid…The Wonka Experience Disaster Was AI's Fyre Fest

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