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Parents are furious at a man who charged them up to £35 (about $44) per ticket for a Willy Wonka-Themed family event in Glasgow, Scotland this weekend. That’s because the “immersive” experience sold to them by a sketchy company called House of Illuminati turned out to be little more than a few props and unsuspecting actors in a mostly empty warehouse, devoid of any chocolate.
Customers, some of whom traveled from afar and waited in a long line with their children, were outraged enough to call the police after “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” turned out to be a scam and the organizer, Billy Coull, hastily shut it down on Saturday afternoon. Footage of the failed tour went viral, in part due to the contrast between the lavish, colorful AI-generated artwork used in promotional materials and the depressing, ridiculously sloppy reality that greeted young fans of Roald’s fantastic novel. Dahl and his various film adaptations.
Those who were duped by the misleading promotion rallied this week for refunds and press coverage in a Facebook group, alternately complaining and joking about the candy-coated catastrophe, and referring to Coull with crass nicknames like “Willy Pendejo” in memes. But while Coull’s attempt to profit from a beloved children’s book is already the stuff of local legend, the rest of his digital footprint reveals a new type of aspiring entrepreneur that may become all too common: the AI abuser.
Coull, who did not respond to a request for comment, appears to be the only employee of the House of Illuminati, one of several companies that have registered. (Was incorporated in November; The company did not respond to a request for comment.) The House of Illuminati website, like the Willy’s Chocolate Experience website, is filled with AI-generated art ads for “unparalleled immersive experiences,” such as “Mystique Galas” and “Enchanted Retreats.” Descriptions of the company and its alleged events are almost certainly written by an AI chatbot, according to analysis by detection tool GPTZero. (The text on the Willy’s Chocolate Experience page is also likely written by AI.)
Since the Wonka fiasco, Coull has taken steps to clean up several social accounts, deleting both one Linkedin profile and a YouTube channel where it seems that he presented himself as some kind of business guru and Life coach. His personal site, also deleted, promoted a series of dubious academic qualifications and said he worked as a “consultant” for a brand called Empowerity, which no longer exists. In 2021, he co-run a Glasgow food bank which he claimed fed thousands of families one month; That doesn’t exist anymore either, and some Glaswegians suspect It was not entirely sincere.
While he removed much of the material that would lead Internet sleuths from the Wonka incident to these earlier projects, Coull, perhaps surprisingly, has not closed the entirely AI-generated House of the Illuminati deal. The company’s Facebook page continues promise refundsand some customers say they have they got their money back. She also has not deleted her Instagram account, which contains only a few posts promoting independently published books available on Amazon. These include titles such as Sell innocence, a novel about a human trafficking survivor who “navigates a treacherous landscape filled with politicians, clerics, celebrities, and billionaires.” The language hints at themes of the QAnon conspiracy movement and misinformation about the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The 16 books on Coull’s Amazon author page were all published in the summer of 2023, some of them on the same day. The synopsis for each is AI-generated, according to GPTZero’s analysis, as is the text between the covers, as one furious reviewer has complained. Coull didn’t even bother to write his own author biography, which declares him a “rising star in the literary world” who “weaves fascinating stories that delve into the mysterious realms of fictional thrillers and gripping conspiracies.” While some of the stories are generic puzzle-based plots along the lines of The Da Vinci Codeothers – like Sell innocence – are oriented towards paranoid right-wing politics. Operation InoculationFor example, it promises a “conspiratorial journey towards the truth of vaccination” related to the so-called “Deep State”, in which “the carefully constructed façade of the vaccination campaign begins to crumble.”
Overall, then, it appears that Coull leaves a long trail of suspicious schemes going back many years, but lately he has used chatbots and AI image generators to expand the reach and ambition of his flimsy enterprises. While it’s unclear how many Amazon shoppers have fallen for fake novels, the Wonka affair demonstrated what can happen when a street vendor gets carried away by his AI-enhanced speech. This time, it just meant an inconvenience and some confused children, and if Coull compensates the families, he will likely avoid more serious repercussions. The next person to sell a purely AI fantasy for a lot of money? They could make Fyre Festival look like a well-planned weekend in the Bahamas.