Willy's Chocolate Catastrophe: A Sweet Disaster Unwrapped
From AI Mishaps to Event Planning Fails, Glasgow's Infamous Experience Serves Up Lessons in Laughter and Logistics.
I’m still laugh-sobbing about this catastrophic nightmare of an event. If you haven’t heard about it yet, it was held in Glasgow and called “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” in an attempt to rip off the IP of a major film studio (not to mention the book).
Paul McConnell, (the unfortunate actor hired to play Willy), says it best in Wired simply by reading from the AI-generated script: "There is a man. We do not know his name. We know him only as the Unknown. The Unknown is an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls."
On the surface, the event failure seems like it’s about how AI is dumb. But it’s really about humans and event planning 101. The bad AI script is just the icing on the terrible cake, or the “cartchy tuns, exarserdray lollipops” from the show’s website copy.
AI or no AI, this disaster could have been prevented by this one simple rule: Always do a Run of Show.
In a Run of Show, every second of the experience you want for your guests/attendees is covered — and every horrible script and lack of props/lighting/speakers/talent is uncovered. Do. Not. Skip. This.
Willy’s Chocolate Experience did succeed on one front: it proved to be highly entertaining for all the wrong reasons — and just another reminder that humans and AI are not two completely separate entities.