[5] The event drew comparisons to the 2008 Lapland New Forest controversy, the 2014 Tumblr fan convention DashCon, and Billy McFarland's 2017 Fyre Festival.

[2] Promotional material advertised "stunning and intricately designed settings inspired by Roald Dahl's timeless tale" and "an array of delectable treats scattered throughout the experience".

[9] Both the website and promotional material used poor-quality AI-generated images, which included several spelling errors such as "cartchy tuns" and "a pasadise of sweet teats" and nonsensical words such as "catgacating".

[3][5] While the event was being promoted in early February, a Reddit user who saw Facebook advertisements suspected it to be a scam and was surprised that people were apparently buying tickets based solely on AI-generated images.

[12] The event was organised by House of Illuminati, a company registered to Billy Coull which claims to offer "unparalleled immersive experiences".

In 2021, he co-directed a now-defunct Glasgow food bank,[13] and in the summer of 2023 he independently published 17 AI-generated books on various topics, including vaccine conspiracy theories.

[5][14][15][16] Another actor playing Willy McDuff was 18-year-old Michael Archibald; the experience was his first ever acting job, and he was given the script at 6 pm on Friday before the event began on Saturday.

[19] Once there, they are confronted by a character called The Unknown, described as "an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls" who seeks to steal the magical "Anti-Graffiti Gobstopper" from McDuff's Imagination Lab.

[19][20] McDuff defeats The Unknown by amplifying the power of the gobstopper and causing his enemy to be "gently swept up by a robotic vacuum, humorously ending the confrontation".

[15] Connell described it as "15 pages of AI-generated gibberish of me just monologuing these mad things",[5] and compared the vacuum cleaner plot point to the video game Luigi's Mansion.

[2][4] Customers described the venue as "little more than an abandoned, empty warehouse",[5] with set dressings including a small bouncy castle, AI-generated backdrop images pinned to some of the walls,[22] and props which were "strewn about on bare concrete floors".

[15] One of the actors playing McDuff improvised the idea that children should pull a "silly face" at The Unknown to scare them away, but Dawkins said that, in other cases, she "just had to awkwardly walk back to my corner".

[1][5][15] The image became a meme and was compared to a picture of a "meth lab"[1][15] and to Édouard Manet's 1882 painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, which depicts "an alienated woman at work".

[35] Similarly, Conservative MP Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the House of Commons, joked that she was under the impression that the Scottish National Party had organised the Glasgow event given its "high cost, poor return, and the fact that the police were called.

"[41] Richard Kraft produced a musical stage reading about the event for the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe,[42] including performances from the actress and comedian Riki Lindhome, the actresses Shelley Regner and Cassandra Parker, the actor Eric Petersen, the Broadway songwriters Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner,[43][44] the director Andy Fickman,[44] the Emmy Award winners Tova Litvin and Doug Rockwell,[42] and Kirsty Paterson, who played herself and a narrator.