I Took a Look at the Terrible Conspiracy Thriller Novels Written by the AI Willy Wonka Experience Guy
By now, you have almost certainly heard about that Willy Wonka immersive experience thing that conned a bunch of children and their parents into shelling out £35 (about $44) per person to walk through a maze of black curtains, high school theater props, and a couple of miserable local actors. The grift was so obvious and simple that it’s a wonder that it took so long for anyone to even consider pulling a trick like this. It turns out that more than a couple of people will buy an AI-generated Candyland photo as the real deal, even if it comes with a caption full of text that could only be classified as misspellings in the most generous sense.
The image on the event’s website advertising the event has now gone down in the annals of Internet legend. “Encherining entertainment!” the poster screams as it makes empty promises of such revelry as “catgacating,” “cartchy tuns,” and “exarserdray lollipops.” You can immediately tell that something is a little off with the illustration when you start noticing the abstract shapes in the corner and, like, a ballerina with abs or something on the balloon? It feels like staring at it for too long like I did can cause a small aneurysm. The Twilight Tunnel (trademark included!) hasn’t gotten as much attention in the press but I feel a duty to point out that these poor kids never got to experience “dim tight,” “vivue sounds,” and “twdrding,” either.
But alas, as soon as families showed up, they got a disappointment even bigger than Willy Wonka mercilessly torturing their children for bad behavior. The pictures of the “event” really speak for themselves here, especially when compared to the original AI generations. The styrofoam-looking rainbow and the depressed Oompa Loompa have already reached meme status at this point, but my personal favorite part is the guy in a mask and a black robe who’s supposed to be an “evil chocolate maker” called “the Unknown” because even the AI who generated the script gave up. There is no doubt in my mind that more details will come to light before the whole fiasco culminates in at least two overly exposed streaming service docuseries.
For now, all we know is that some company called “House of Illuminati” organized the Glasgow-based event, officially called “Willy’s Chocolate Experience.” Of course, there’s no relation to the Warner Bros.-controlled property, which is a bold move to make two months after the studio refreshed everyone’s memories with a prequel movie. Neither the event space nor the actors had any clue what to expect until showtime (although the talent got a sinking feeling when they read the “gibberish” AI script the night before), so the question remains: Who the was the mastermind behind all of this?
Well, it turns out that Willy’s Chocolate Expereince is just the latest in a long line of cons from a one Billy Coull, Glasgow native and member of every grift-based movement you can think of from life coaching to anti-vax peddling. There is, of course, an incredible irony to a guy who has published books about the looming threat of new world orders and globalist agendas naming his one-man company “House of Illuminati.” It suggests an almost clinical nature to the Coull’s habits, as if the man simply has a compulsive need to grift. As Rolling Stone has pointed out, all 17 of the books in Coull’s Amazon author profile page were released last summer, suggesting that he’s been radicalizing his unsuspecting ChaptGPT program into the dark world of right-wing conspiracy theories.
For starters, there’s Selling Innocence: Rosie Black’s Escape from Hell, which chronicles the harrowing tale of a woman in a human trafficking ring. The perpetrators are all the types of characters you would expect to pop up in a plot like this: “politicians, clergymen, celebrities, and billionaires.” The synopsis points out that even though the novel is a work of fiction, it’s meant to “be a call to action against the abhorrent crime of trafficking,” signifying that Coull has seized on the same QAnon scam that people like the guy who played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ have proudly and openly embraced to make some of that sweet paranoid cash.
Coull has also delved head first into the anti-vaccination movement in Operation Inoculation, which has a subtitle so hilariously long that it barely fits on the cover. It reads, and I am not shitting you, exactly like this: Unveiling the A Conspiratorial Journey into Vaccination Truths Deep State Conspiracy. Never have I seen such glorious levels of shits not being given. It’s wonderful, really.
The cover image, by the way, is just a picture of the COVID virus grayed out like it just killed its family in a Netflix true crime documentary with “CLASSIFIED” stamped across it in big red tacky letters. The same nebulous forces of evil pop up in the synopsis, things like “industry,” government,” and “regulatory bodies,” and mentions that readers will “grapple with the notion of truth in a world filled with hidden agendas.” One glance and it’s completely obvious that the AI Coull used just strung together a bunch of the most generic conspiracy theory buzzwords.
Shadows of Deception: Unveiling the Deep State Conspiracy is even less original, and includes the word “puppeteers” at least six times in the synopsis. Remarkably, it looks like as if Shadows might even literally be the same book as Operation Inoculation with slightly different variations on the Chat GPT prompts. They both have protagonists named “Sarah” who navigate the inner world of “powerful adversaries” and “powerful forces” that manipulate “power structures” and “power dynamics,” a theme that Coull explores further in Shadows of Power: Unveiling the Secrets of a Global Conspiracy where “the balance of power teeters on a knife’s edge” in a “post-Council world.” What is this Council and what happened to it? I don’t know, the AI thought the word sounded scary.
The more you look at Coull’s bibliography, the more you notice that his works are also weird ripoffs of Dan Brown novels. Somehow, these are even more nonsensical than his right-wing conspiracies, using nondescript words like “cosmic” and “enigma” to explain what I think is, once again, essentially the same plot of someone exposing some hidden truth about a fill-in-the-blank topic. The Bible and secret codes pop up a few times and he delves into sci-fi territory on more than one occasion, but at this point reading the descriptor “enigmatic” over and over again was giving me a nosebleed.
Unsurprisingly, almost none of these novels are available for purchase. However, something called The Biohazard Protocol comes free with a Kindle trial. That’s probably why it’s Coull’s most popular book, garnering a whopping number of two one-star reviews. I couldn’t resist taking a look. Are there even real words inside this thing? I had to know.
The Biohazard Protocol is just, once again, a bunch of AI-generated buzzwords fit into about 61 pages of barely held together plot. If there’s anything remarkable about it, it’s that the AI somehow managed to touch on both sides of the political debate. The beginning of the story is about a scientist named Emily who accidentally unleashes a “biohazard” during a long experiment she obsesses over. She feels terrible about her accident, but it’s not her fault because a group ominously called “the organization” actually orchestrated the incident. The organization seems to be some deep state shadow government, but also not really because Emily eventually calls “the authorities” to arrest them.
Emily is celebrated as a hero for uncovering the conspiracy and creating a cure to the biohazard, an account written down in a book called — surprise! — “The Biohazard Protocol!” The middle portion of the book is a very boring account of how she goes on to use science responsibly to change the world for the better. She even helps tackle climate change with the help of a Dr. Ramirez, which leads the pair to uncover yet another shadow organization made up of evil scientists who want to “conduct reckless experiments without regard for the consequences.” We don’t get to know much about this group because Emily and her good guy scientists publicly expose them. Again.
The novel ends with Emily retiring and passing her job down to an ambitious woman named Ava as she stares at the sunset and becomes “the guardian of knowledge.” Something like that. About halfway through the book, there are complete repeats of previous sentences, so everything literally starts to blend into each other. As one of the Amazon reviewers points out, “the sun sets a grand total of 15 times.” But I guess it’s like George Lucas says: “It’s like poetry, it rhymes.”
If Billy Coull put a little more effort into his grifts, maybe he could have joined the ranks of those promoting colloidal silver as a COVID cure or creating a whole YouTube brand out of exposing the globalists. But Billy Coull works fast, not hard, and the guy has failed too many schemes to count. Redditor DoubleelbuoD over at /glasgow stumbled upon a domain for Empowerity.com, a site that Coull took down but forgot to delete the Facebook page for. Just like Coull’s books are a mess of the most generic conspiracy theory-related words, so is Empowerity a puke pile of self-motivational phrases and diagrams that encourage people to “implement their ideas” and utilize strategies “that’ll provide healthy profit margins.”
The same Redditor also found his personal website on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which mentions that he graduated from the University of Sedona with a degree in “Theocentric Psychology.” “UoS,” as he calls it on his website, is, in fact a real place. Sort of. They give out something called “metaphysical degrees” to those looking to explore how to unlock a deeper consciousness. It’s some whacky New Thought woo that deserves its own profile I’ll write later.
For now, it’s safe to conclude that Coull has not only tried his hand at the conspiracy theory grift; he’s also taken a shot at the life coaching grift. Compared to these, Willy’s Chocolate Experience was daringly original. At least that had actual props.
As an added cherry on top, it looks as of ol’ Billy boy started a food bank called the Gowanbank Hub with the help of some crowdfunding. In August of 2021, the Glasgow Times published an article about Gowanbank’s lack of supplies, which others could help mitigate by donating food — or cash — of their own. The article also notes that Gowanbank gave out clothes and financial advice, but little information on the goings-on there exist since the business, a designated “commuity interest company,” shuttered in January 2022, according to Glasgow World.
Despite this particularly heartless con, I love Billy Coull. I love Billy because his blatant disregard for a midocum of legitimacy, his unseizing attitude to continuously refuse to put even the most minimal of efforts into his projects, and his uncanny ability to never stop trying out new scams reveals everything that lies at the heart of modern-day con artists. Like Billy, their political views are whatever sells, their life advice whatever they think people want to hear. They keep so much of their actual personality hidden behind their own made-up lore that they almost come across as the same sort of shadowy forces that lie at the center of their conspiracies, only they’re not nearly as organized.
Billy Coull somehow failed to see how using AI to falsely advertise an event would backfire against him, probably because none of his scams ever went this far. There’s a video of a bunch of pissed off parents spewing at his dumb face, and I swear you can see the hint of realization in his eyes that have finally let him know that, yes, he has indeed fucked up.
Other con men, of course, are much more discerning and careful about their schemes. But at the end of the day, as the sun sets in the horizon of The Biohazard Protocol, they’re truly all molding their narratives out of the same unimaginative, repetitive catchphrases and empty ideologies. They may not all use ChatGPT, but they all might as well be echoing the same AI-generated ideas and selling the same plastic candy.
