Human Creativity in a World of Pure AI-magination

Glaswegian families visiting an immersive Willy Wonka-themed experience this week might not have found a golden ticket but they did strike social media gold. Enticed by lurid marketing images and the prospect of visiting a real live version of the famous fictional chocolate factory, visitors were outraged to find themselves in a dank warehouse strewn with a few crummy decorations, fronted by a human-sized Oompa-Loompas working in what appears to be a meth lab.

There’s nothing the internet loves more than crushing disappointment, so Willy's Chocolate Experience inevitably went viral - perhaps marketers should learn to add more mediocre nightmare fuel to their experiences if they really want to be ‘part of the conversation’?

There’s a lot to unpack, not least as the drama has started to collide with the week’s other big social media discourse, the ‘Where is Kate Middleton Conspiracy’, but there’s one thing in particular that’s really caught my attention. The role of AI. I mean, Gene Wilder would never. Chalamet… I’m not so sure.

In a move that can only be described as ground-breaking and disruptive, the organisers turned to artificial intelligence to both market and shape what I guess we’re calling ‘the immersive theatre’. Social ads featured florid, colourful Candy Land early-Midjourney-looking images strewn with confabulated words - clearly the work of AI, though it’s not clear if visitors believed those to be real or not. 

What’s more, proving themselves to be industry leading experts, organisers leveraged AI to create the copyright-skirting script, ' Wonkidoodles at McDuff’s Chocolate Factory', which includes such gems as stage directions for the audience and a mysterious villain hiding in the walls called The Unknown. It looks like OpenAI has found its guest celebrities for Cannes this year.

Alas, it turns out that AI can’t do everything and it fell to human beings to bring the Twighlight Tunnel and the Enchanted Garden to life. And, whaddaya know, it turns out that without the values of human common sense and craftsmanship, all the AI in the world won’t save you. 

All of the creative leaders I’ve interviewed about artificial intelligence have said that ‘it’s just a tool’ and that it still needs human creativity to drive it. As a part-time misanthrope, I can’t say that I always have such faith in the unique brilliance of the human mind - after all it was humans who thought that this was a good idea. AI didn’t make them do it. But, perhaps with a talented group of humans and a budget that stretched beyond one jelly bean per child, this off-brand Wonkaland might have been something.

Of course this tale has captured the imagination of the industry. Annika Bizon, marketing and omnichannel director for Samsung UK&I says it’s a sobering lesson for marketers about the importance of being ethical with AI advertising. “As marketers we should be able to take advantage of all the latest tools and tech to really supercharge our campaigns and catch the eye. But it can’t come at the expense of the truth, jeopardising consumer trust. This is why proper identifiers of AI-edited images like watermarks are so important. The intelligence may be artificial, but the marketing must be real.” 

Meanwhile m ss ng peces’s Ari Kuschnir was straight onto X having turned the saga into an awards-bait case study. At this point, I’m going to appeal directly to the Cannes Lions Brand Experience and Activation Jury: you know what to do. 

But for all the talk about the importance of human creativity and craft when it comes to working with AI, I wonder if we’ve all missed the point. Because while, yes, this is a commercial failure that left children in tears and led to the police being called… maybe we’re the ones who don’t get it. It’s… art? Kinda?

The creepy weirdo in the mask and black bedsheet. The bored and embarrassed Breaking Bad Oompa-Loompa lady. The videos of outraged Weegies. The poignant sadness of the grey smartphone photographs being shared on socials - I want them blown up and framed. I think even Banksy would agree that this trumps Dismaland in its exquisite bleakness.

There’s already a petition to re-open the experience. If it did it would have queues not seen since Binley Mega Chippy. 

Right now, Paul King and Simon Farnaby are undoubtedly racking their brains for a follow up to the box office smash, Wonka, and here’s a plot that’s ripe for the taking. Slugworth, Ficklegruber and Prodnose use the steampunk equivalent of AI to create a fake Wonka’s Factory? 

The memes, videos and cast interviews that have spilled forth over the past few days have been catnip for the terminally online - thanks in part because of what it all says about this strange, confusing moment in time, politically, socially and technologically. The story gives us the brief feeling of superiority over something new and confusing, yet whether it's the poor actors struggling with garbled gobbledy-gook, the poor visitors who were swindled, the poor kids who wasted their half-term holiday or poor-the-rest-of-us who have been cravenly hanging on every detail like we don't have anything better to do, we've been dancing to its tune.

Without AI, this is all just yet another sorry con. With AI, it’s content.