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Billy Coull, the director of the House of Illuminati, which is the organization that hosted the disastrous “Willy Wonka Experience” in Glasgow last month, says the incident has ruined his life to such an extent that he’s lost the “love of his life.”
In a documentary produced by the U.K.’s Channel 5 titled Wonka: The Scandal That Rocked Britain, Coull said that he lost “all of his friends and the love of his life” due to the mishap.
The long-story-short of the instantly infamous “Willy Wonka Experience” is that the organization used AI to generate an advertisement for a children’s event that promised loads of fun but wound up being a scantily-decorated warehouse that had such aggressive crack den vibes that the police were called to shut the whole thing down.
”I was sick to the pit of my tummy. I was hoping for an event that would be joyful, happy. I wanted people to experience happiness,” Coull said of the experience.
“I have lost my friends. I’ve lost the love of my life. I was made out to be the face of all evil. And genuinely, that’s really not the case,” he said of the fallout.
While Coull’s interview began to get people to feel bad for him, further research suggests that scamming people is something he’s made a habit of.
Back in 2021, Coull was a trustee and co-founder of an organization that canceled a Christmas/Santa event after already receiving donations and toys.
While Coull blamed a virus variant for the closure — “We were worried and concerned about the Omicron virus, the ‘no Chrimbo’ virus as we call it,” he said, according to The Glasgow Times (“Chrimbo” is U.K. slang for Christmas) — that contradicts the point of view of some of the AI-generated books he’s published in the past.
Coull has used AI to rip people off in the past, as he published 16 AI-generated books in the summer of 2023, including “Selling Innocence,” which tells a QAnon-adjacent story of a human trafficking survivor who “navigates a treacherous landscape filled with politicians, clergymen, celebrities, and billionaires.”
He also used AI to publish Operation Inoculation, which describes itself as being a “conspiratorial journey into truth and the deep-state.”
“The 16 books on Coull’s Amazon author page were all published in the summer of 2023 — some of them on the very same day. The synopsis for each is AI-generated, according to GPTZero analysis, and so is the text between the covers, as one irate reviewer has complained.”
“Coull couldn’t even be bothered to pen his own author bio, which declares him a ‘rising star in the literary world’ who ‘weaves spellbinding tales that delve into the mysterious realms of fictional thrillers and gripping conspiracies.'” [via Rolling Stone]
AI was infamously used to generate the scripts for the “Willy Wonka Experience” and created a villain called “The Unknown” that “lives in the walls.” AI art was also used to market the event, which promised an “unparalleled immersive experiences.”