• givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I know people don’t read articles, but at least scroll down to the picture of “an Oompa Loompa running a meth lab”

        • Leeker@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Just like her script being created by a AI. The money they are going to pay her in is made by AI.

      • Rolando@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Speaking to MailOnline, she confirmed that not only had she not been paid she also hadn’t been briefed on what her role would involve. She explained: ‘I was angry at the time because I felt like this is embarrassing for me, and I felt bad for the people coming in as well. I actually ended up shouting at the guy. I just said to him he’s a joke and this is like embarrassing, and how can we basically live with himself, doing this to people. This is really embarrassing for me. My job is teaching kids yoga and I go into schools and stuff and I do kids’ entertainment. This is none of our faults at all. We got the job and then we got given the script. By that point I’d signed a contract and they said they were going to put us £500 for the two days which is a lot of money which is a lot of money to say no to.’

        https://www.dailymail.co.uk/galleries/article-13134989/Embarrassed-Oompa-Loompas-actresses-Wonka-scam-talks.html

  • someguy3@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Coull appears to be the only official employee of the company, …he presents himself as a business-savvy life coach.

    Life coach, why am I not surprised?

  • veee@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    Connell wasn’t the only actor surprised to find that props promised by the script didn’t actually exist.

    So there was never a dress rehearsal and the performance was a cold read? AI may be to blame for the bad script, but there many other points of failure happening here.

  • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Am I supposed to be mad at these small time con-men capitalists? This is what the modern global economy is all about. Attempting to fuck over the people who aren’t you, attempting to receive the maximum while providing the absolute minimum you can get away with without consequences. Their mistake was only slightly miscalculating that minimum where people would feel cheated but otherwise leave minus their money grumbling, but not enough to make it a weird news of the day story.

    When’s the last time your fast food sandwich looked remotely like the one on all the signs?They look like that sandwich in the ad was a tire that got deflated, deforming under its own weight, at best. Those scammers just had swaths of lawyers and lobbyists to make their false advertising your problem, until now it’s just how it is. Deception is a vital component of market capitalism.

    Why are you harassing these glorious, aspiring job creators acting in rational self-interest?

      • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Can we start with the con-men hurting/exploiting millions and threatening billions with their “externalities,” capitalist Orwellian shorthand for “I already have your money, so my mess is your problem, you stupid fucking suckers🖕🤑🖕?”

        Because these bottom feeders are just a symptom of the above’s global sociocultural damage. They ruined some kid’s afternoons (but when those grown kids are dying from capitalist made climate change induced Cat 6 superstorms, or hungry from the associated crop failures, or the scammers successfully lobby to catch yet another tax break out of the asses of those kid’s education funding using their unlimited exploitation bucks, 🤷). It might be cathartic to kick their ass, but it’s odd and inconsistent to the extreme considering how comfortable we are with our most prolific con-men being allowed to own, and keep!.. everything, every exploited, scammed dollar, instead of getting their ass kicked as you say.

    • veroxii@aussie.zone
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      7 months ago

      We went to Japan last year and they have a fast food chain called MOS burger. The food looked exactly like the menu pictures… It was amazing! Plump and delicious.

    • fidodo@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      What? They didn’t slightly miscalculate the minimum, they grossly blasted past it. Yes, your point is that false advertising is a spectrum, and a certain amount is generally expected, but this isn’t in some mushy grey area of it, it’s egregiously over the line. Yeah food doesn’t look like it does on the packages, but if this event were food it would be a grey goop. Frankly I find your attempt at ignoring magnitude lazy, sloppy, and cynical.

      • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Lol magnitude? Really? These microcapitalists ruined these kids afternoon with their scam, while the ones these scammers emulate poison them with microplastics and Threaten their ONLY habitat, to the scam shareholder’s applause and most of society considering them aspirational figures, buying the scam of “sometimes companies make a mess, it isn’t their problem or responsibility, and we call this competely valid economic event an externality herp derp 🤡.”

        Also Most corporate run INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY EXPERIENCE exhibitions are only one step up from this in terms of marketing vs reality. They calculated the formula of acceptable customer mark dissatisfaction from intentionally dishonest marketing hype correctly.

        So please, do continue telling me more about the magnitude of these microcapitalist’s microscam.

        sits in Wonka meme pose.

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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    7 months ago

    I look forward to more AI failures and flops and hope the public and financial backlash is intense for each every one of them. You cannot automate human creativity, and until the powers that be feel that in their wallets, we’re going to be getting more and more of this inane drivel while actual, talented writers lose job opportunities.

    The company has since promised to refund customers, but whether they’ll all actually get their money back remains to be seen.

    I’d be demanding it in full.

    • fluxion@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      They didn’t even proof read the promotional flyers to make sure they made sense. It’s an absolutely absurd level of laziness.

      • phillaholic@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        You’re describing AI. We are in the get rich quick period of AI usage.

    • Ledivin@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      This was clearly a scam from the start. AI art is a tool, just like a paintbrush - if you don’t know what you’re doing (or if you just dont give a fuck, like this event), the outcome will understandably be shit.

    • Riskable@programming.dev
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      7 months ago

      This wasn’t a failure of AI. It was just a low-effort charade. If you want to put in the least amount of effort possible in such things, AI is there for you.

      If they had put in any effort whatsoever they would’ve taken the first “draft” BS generated by the AI, made some minimal changes, then fed it back into the AI for further improvement.

      Chat AIs are just that: Chat. You’re supposed to go back and forth in conversation with the AI in order to get a good result. It appears the organizers of this event put together some terrible prompts and didn’t even bother to spend an extra ten minutes refining things.

      AI is a tool like any other. This pathetic event is a textbook case of how AI can’t replace humans entirely (not yet, anyway). You still gotta put in some effort.

  • Son_of_dad@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Doesn’t sound much worse than the Avengers experience that came to my city. It was like $30 for a 10 minute walkabout of a big room with the avenger costumes and a bunch of costumes, I felt ripped off

    • pruwyben@discuss.tchncs.de
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      7 months ago

      I get the feeling that most of these "experience’ things I’ve been hearing about lately are low effort cash grabs.

      • Son_of_dad@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        From what I understand the Jurassic world one was actually really good and they put in the effort

    • pete_the_cat@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Or like the Friends experience that is a yearly occurrence in Manhattan. I’m a huge fan of the show and lived in NYC for 5 years, but I never went there. The first time I saw it, my girlfriend and I walked by the place it was at, and it was a shitty re-creation of Central Perk. There were like 100 people lined up on the sidewalk just to go inside and sit on the orange couch and drink coffee. James Michael Tyler (who played Gunther, the barista) was also there.

    • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
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      7 months ago

      Ick. To a very specific audience - prop makers - that $30 is a great deal to get up close looks at costumes and props whose details don’t always show up on screen.

      Sucks if they advertised it as more, though.

  • tipicaldik@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Sure, AI can whip up fantastical imagery and low-effort dialog — but if audiences call BS, the blowback can be extraordinarily embarrassing.

    I see AI generated bullshit on youtube all the time these days. To the point where I can tell by the thumbnail before I even watch it. I’ve gotten in the habit of checking out new-to-me channels in a private window first, before deciding whether I want to subscribe or even keep watching. The instant I detect any AI… either in the voice or the nonsensical writing, I’m outa there. I do e-learning multimedia for a living, and we use a lot of stock images, and those sites are being loaded up with AI generated garbage. It’s getting harder to find stuff that isn’t AI, and using it to generate your own is a total crapshoot as far as results go…

    • NutWrench@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Yup. I think the worst offenders are the videos that are just Wikipedia pages with still images and an AI text-to-speech robot voice. It’s the world’s laziest form of “content creation” and I always downvote them.

    • ProfessorProteus@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Same here, generally, but I think there are a tiny few people who have a legitimate reason for using TTS. For instance, those whose English skills are lacking, or who have an accent which some might find distracting. Or a person who is self-conscious about their voice but still has something to offer, or maybe those who legitimately can’t speak at all. Hell, I support anyone who could narrate but doesn’t want to put their voice out there for privacy reasons, or to keep it out of the public space where it will inevitably be used as training data.

      I’d still rather listen to the human, because I can’t stand any of the “AI” voices, especially those that are used on every fucking tiktok (I stay away from TT, but unfortunately the voices are pretty ubiquitous). It might sound silly but I’d prefer good old Microsoft Sam to the any of these new voices.

      One channel I found recently for coding-related topics uses TTS but before I got annoyed enough to close it, I realized that the script was probably hand-written, just narrated by a machine. The video was highly informative, and I walked away having learned some new information. For the curious

      Something that sucks about this new wave of TTS is that we get some odd errors in pronunciation that probably wouldn’t be there if it was spoken by a human. A missing comma or other punctuation errors will pass a spell check but end up sounding really strange due to the broken inflection. Uncanny Valley stuff I suppose.

      AI thumbnails are utter garbage though. All polish, no substance, no love for the craft.

      • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
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        7 months ago

        Wow. This feels like a terrific future gameshow quiz topic:

        "Given the following true news story, was the complete failure of this effort later attributed to:

        • A. Half-assing it with artificial intelligence
        • B. Half-assing it while on too many or too few drugs
        • C. Both

        "

  • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
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    7 months ago

    duped unsuspecting parents into bringing their kids to a truly dmsial event using clearly AI-generated marketing materials.

    Said the AI generated article.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    7 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Over the weekend, organizers of what was described as a “Willy Wonka Experience” in Scotland duped unsuspecting parents into bringing their kids to a truly dmsial event using clearly AI-generated marketing materials.

    The $44-a-ticket experience turned out to fall well short of the fantastical landscapes dreamed up by an AI, with cheap-looking props sparsely populating a dirty warehouse near downtown Glasgow.

    Local actor and comedian Paul Connell explained on TikTok how he was hired to be one of the three — not just one — Willy Wonkas tasked to entertain children at the event.

    “Scene ends with the audience fully immersed in the interactive, magical experience, laughter and joy filling the air,” it continues.

    Sure, AI can whip up fantastical imagery and low-effort dialog — but if audiences call BS, the blowback can be extraordinarily embarrassing.

    As Rolling Stone reports, Coull appears to be the only official employee of the company, and has since scrubbed many of his social media accounts, including a YouTube and LinkedIn profile, where he presents himself as a business-savvy life coach.


    The original article contains 728 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • thefartographer@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    This was one of the best reads I’ve had in a long time. Clicking the links to related articles is highly recommended.

  • Armok: God of Blood@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 months ago

    This whole event reads more like an artist trying to showcase the dangers of machine learning models. It’s honestly hilarious to see how people just fell for some pretty pictures that were clearly generated with AI and ended up at an oompa loompa meth lab.

    • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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      7 months ago

      People going in expecting a fun adventure with Willy Wonka and having a horrible time because it was created by an asshole trying to teach them a lesson…sounds like the plot of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!

  • PeterPoopshit@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Imagine hosting an event so lame that it makes international news solely because of how incredibly lame it was. Just damn.

  • Garyx23x@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    The best part about this event was the new Wonka lore of The Unknown, an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls

    • Agent641@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Therqpist: “The evil chocolate maker in the walls isn’t real, he can’t hurt you!”

      Me: gestures to this article

  • AstralPath@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    If you haven’t seen the website for the event, do yourself a favor and check it out. The AI typos in the images are hilarious.