Willy Wanker and the Great Glasgow Grift - Part II

Life Coach. Psychologist. Author. Activist. Enigmatic Wordsmith. This is the E! True Hollywood Story of Willy Wanker.

When we last left our story of AI-generated heartbreak and childhood dreams crushed to a fine pixie dust powder that you can snort through a straw, we arrived at the scene of the crime to find the madman behind it all.

Billy Coull, it seems, is the proprietor and sole employee of the ‘company’, House of Illuminati, the organization who’s name was plastered across the failed Glasgow cash-grab. The company is registered in his name, and was only incorporated in November of 2023. It was billed as an event organizing service, and, on its defunct website, makes grand promises of unparalleled immersive experiences and other such vague, nebulous, poorly-defined hokum. Needless to say, I’m not sure how anyone could take a look at what they supposedly have on offer and come away with a sense that it was anything other than a heaping pile of steaming, malodorous bullshit.

Like, none of this means anything. You get that, right? Nothing. It’s just bland, hollow pablum, less substantial than a thin foam.

Oh, and if it wasn’t obvious, all of the imagery on the site is 100% AI-generated. And so is the text, which, again, anyone who isn’t a hylic would be able to sniff out mighty quick with an iota of brain power. There isn’t a single asset that wasn’t cooked up by ChatGPT. If that wasn’t obvious from the bland, sterile, soulless writing, this was confirmed by multiple sources with the use of the AI detection software, GPTZero, which was made for the sole purpose of rooting out shit like this, and, at the rate things are going, will probably be a necessary tool just to navigate the internet in the near future. We’ll touch on that later, though.

In the aftermath of the event, Coull was quick to scrub as much of himself off the internet as possible, taking down his personal website and locking most of his social media accounts. However, it didn’t take long for internet sleuths to find that the man has a long and storied history of questionable business endeavors. It’s worth noting that a lot of this research was done by disgruntled customers of the event, which, I just have to say… maybe - just maybe - a bit of due diligence before hand might have saved them a few quid.

On Coull’s now-deleted YouTube channel, he posted various videos in which he posits himself to be something of a generic brand Jordan Peterson at best with notes the Alpha Male huckster/influencer types at worst, all wrapped up with the air of being some sort of enlightened business guru who escaped the rat race… and for a small, small payment of all the money you have, he can show you the secret to breaking free of the financial Samara, as well! Remember that dumb fuck who used to buy ads on YouTube where he humble-bragged about his Lamborghini, which he bought because he… read books, or whatever?

Yeah. That chode. It’s a lot like that.

There’s a lot of talk about hustle and grind and playing smarter, not harder, which really all boils down to depriving yourself of basic needs so that, maybe, you too can buy overpriced status symbols to impress people that don’t like you and never will no matter how many pretty tchotchkes you have (and will inevitably have reposessed). It’s like someone who saw the sigma male memes and lacked the good sense to pick up on the joke.

But, even then, Coull is not a based sigma giga-chad, nor does he live that sigma grindset, since the only advice he seems to live by is how you can use ChatGPT to do everything for you. That’s poser shit if I ever saw that. A true sigma would never outsource to ChatGPT. How would I know?

Well… let’s just say real recognizes real. And this Coull fella? Yeah… he don’t pass the smell test.

I can pick up on the stench of insecure beta comin’ off this muddafugga all the way across the Atlantic.

On his personal website, archived here, he describes himself thusly:

I help people to live a phenomenal [sic]. For fun, I like  traveling , observing nature, reading books, solving problems, building things, doing awesome things for charity and spending time with my amazing family.

Super cool, man. Let me guess - you like going on adventures and listening to music, too? All those things that totally normal and very people do? Radical. You can also tell that he didn’t actually use ChatGPT to write that, since I assume even ChatGPT would have added life after phenomenal.

He lists a number of dubious accolades and academic achievements. including a Masters degree in Business Administration, various Marketing degrees and certs, a fucking Doctorate in Philosophy, and, most august of all, a Mpsy.D. in Psychology and PsyTh.D. Theocentric Psychology.

Never heard of those? Me neither. All of these come from the University of Sedona.

As you can probably tell from the RenFaire-ass font and all the talk of metaphysics and higher consciousness, this school is not an accredited university. However, based on what I’ve found, it’s not not a legitimate school. It is a religious school, which doesn’t need accreditation to be considered legitimate in the eyes of… well, whoever. The whole things seems to be the creation of a certain Paul Leon Masters. If Billy Coull wants to believe he’s Jordan Peterson, then Dr. Masters appears to believe himself to be Bob Proctor. There’s a lot of talk about the universe and vibrations, affirmations and manifesting. That kind of stuff. At first blush, it reads a lot of mealy-mouthed new age talk that says a lot but means absolutely nothing.

And, look - I like Bob Proctor. I think there’s actually something to his idea of manifesting and positive thinking and changing your paradigm, as he would say. But all of this sounds like it’s aping off Proctor’s work and shirking a lot of the psychological parts of it and leaning very, very hard into the metaphysical aspect. You know - the part that’s much harder, if not impossible, to quantify, and really just boils down to Clap your hands and believe and you’ll be a millionaire over night, rather than dig into methods and means of adjusting your subconcious psychology and deeply-rooted behaviors. Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe I’m being uncharitable. Perhaps there’s more to it, but I don’t have the time to dive down that rabbit hole.

For now.

While it seems like a good number of perfectly normal people have gotten perfectly normal degrees from this school, and it seems to be a step above the usual shady diploma-mills you see aggressively advertised, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that Coull’s papers from this place are about as valuable as a sheet of single-ply toilet paper. Used.

Not to say that a degree from an actual accredited university is much better these days, but, still. I’m pretty sure if Coull ever tried to sit and talk shop in with people who got a Psy.D. instead of an MPsy.D., he’d be laughed out of the room.

Coull lists himself as the founder and CEO of a consultant firm called Empowerity, which he started in 2017. The description reads as follows:

At empowerity [sic], I help people live a phenomenal life by providing the tools, knowledge and information that can enable even average Joe start and grow a widely profitable businesses.

Very informative, I know.

I have to imagine that this was little more than the usual life coach scheme, where people paid him extortionary sums for him to tell them the same thing he told a dozen other people, which is usually just the shit your dad told you when you were thirteen and didn’t listen to, or truisms you might find in a fortune cookie.

I have the displeasure of knowing some of these types in person, so, please - if you ever find yourself curious about what they have to say, don’t pay $1,200 for a fifteen minute session with them; Jordan Peterson has a lot of content on YouTube for absolutely free, and it seems that 99% of them are just repeating what he already said much more eloquently. Don’t go to University of Sedona, either - some of Bob Proctor’s books are available on Spotify as audiobooks for Premium members. You’ll get more out of it, and save yourself a lot of time, money, and probably some ridicule, too.

Most of Coull’s self-described work history pertains to marketing, which I call the Domain of Satan. Really, if I could lay the blame of most of modernity’s issues at the feet of any singular thing, most of it would go towards the very concept of advertising. This is reductionist, I’m aware, but I also just really, really hate advertisements and marketing. It’s probably why I’m so bad at self-promotion. That all is a screed for another day, but let’s just say that I am sick to bastard death of being advertised to, day in and day out, constantly, on every single fucking platform, screen, sign, and poster, and all without my consent. I say that Americans are the most thoroughly psy-opped people on the planet, and no small part of that comes from the unrelenting deluge of advertisements that we are constantly bombarded with on a daily basis. Never forget that Joseph Goebbels took his cues directly from the the father of modern marketing, Edward Bernays, who literally wrote the definitive books on the dark and ruinous sorcery of advertising.

If you want to know how I really feel about advertising, just watch this.

This is all to say that I’m not surprised that Coull has a background in marketing. It’s a field populated by soulless hylics and unscrupled ghouls who parasitically feed of the hard work and labor of literally everyone else and offer almost zero utility.

I digress.

Coull’s page also makes the claim that he ran a now-defunct Glasgow food bank that fed thousands of families a week, and ran various outreach and charitable organizations in the city. Which, yeah. Sure you did, bud.

And if you think I’m just being mean, Glaswegian internet sleuths have found almost no evidence to support these claims. In fact, if there’s evidence for evidence for anything, it’s that he didn’t.

Niall Christie of Third Force News did an immaculate write-up of Coull’s checkered history, which you can read in full here. It looks as if rebranding to House of Illuminati was something of a necessity, since his time with the foodbank-cum-charity - called The Gowanbank Hub - marred his reputation and left him firmly branded as a huckster among the Glaswegian population. Here’s some of Coull’s Greastest Grifts Hits uncovered by Christie.

1. In 2021, The Gowanbank Hub advertised a fundraising “gala” that was intended to be held at a Hilton hotel in Glasgow, with celebrity appearances including drag queen Joe Black of RuPaul’s Drag Race fame and DJ Gok Wan, who, for a gay man, looks remarkably like a butch lesbian. Tickets were sold at ninety-five pounds per head, which comes out to a staggering $120 a head. Of course, representatives of both Black and Wan said that neither performer had ever been contacted about performing at the event. And neither had the Hilton. But the event did happen… at a pub. With the only entertainment being Coull himself.

2. In 2022, Coull ran for a position in Glasgow’s city council.

   

   GraphicDesignisMyPassion.png

   He solicited donations for his campaign. When the elections were held on May 5th of that year, Coull failed to register. What happened to the donations he collected? One can only speculate.

3. The Gowanbank Hub claimed to be official charitable partners with multiple charitable groups operating in both Scotland and abroad, including the Scottish government’s official housing program, Police Scotland, and even the US Army Medical Center for Excellence, based out of Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, which, having been to the area around the fort myself once or twice, I find difficult to believe anything excellent comes out of that armpit. Of course, when contacted, none of these groups claimed to have any ties to The Gowanbank Hub. Police Scotland - which is the national police force for the entirety of Scotland - was cited as saying, “In terms of the Police logo being used, no permission was granted for its use and we were not in partnership with them."

4. Chris Stephens, a member of Parliament that represents South Glasgow, where the organization was based, claimed that his office had to step in to help untangle the myriad of controversy surrounding their shady practices. According to Stephens, other local charitable groups were eager to help The Gowanbank Hub get off the ground, but quickly abandoned it after the money they contributed simply disappeared. He’s cited as saying, “My office raised concerns with appropriate agencies as did others. Once Gowanbank Hub ceased operations, there was a real sense locally of a sigh of relief.”

5. The organization claimed to be directly partnered with the national government of Scotland itself. Which, naturally, a spokesperson had this to say when questioned: “The Scottish Government have not provided funding directly to this organization.”

6. It turns out that Willy’s Chocolate Experience wasn’t even the first time Coull duped children. The organization ran a campaign to collect toys to distribute among underprivileged children in Glasgow during the Christmas season. They collected donations to buy toys. The toys never materialized. A local was quoted as saying, “That was probably the final straw for him in the community. It’s one thing to con adults, it’s another to rip off children.”

It appears that Coull definitely made a name for himself in Glasgow. In the article, a Glaswegian city activist only identified as Donna had this to say:

It won’t happen in this area again, we’re all wise to Billy. I want Pollok [The Glaswegian neighborhood/estate housing complex the Gowanbank Hub operated out of] to be seen in a positive light. The whole area shouldn’t be tainted because of one person. It’s a lot of work done by a lot of people and we don’t want it all unravelled, and have to start again. Nobody here is laughing, it’s not funny any more. We need to be careful people don’t think we’re all just like Billy.

My personal favorite, however, comes from an anonymous local that reached out to TFN to say the following:

I’m disappointed to see nothing happened after that event [Referring to the failed toy drive]. Getting away with that gave him the gumption to put on the Willy Wonka nonsense. This was never going to happen, the guy is a fruit loop. When the hub closed and he disappeared I breathed a huge sigh of relief. And then we found out about Willy Wonka. We did not have anything to do with him. That guy is a menace to society and will do something very damaging. He behaved like a complete fantasist. He claimed to be a doctor from some metaphysical university, having bought the title. 

So, yeah - needless to say, Willy’s Chocolate Experience was not going to get off the ground if Coull’s name had been attached to it. As Donna said - We’re all wise to Billy. How convenient that House of Illuminati cropped up right after all this public kerfuffle was kicked up around his name.

I gotta give Billy Boy this - he’s dedicated to the hustle. If he’s grinding on anything, apparently, it’s everyone in Glasgow’s fucking nerves. Doing research, it appears as if the dubious title of Glasgow’s Most Hated Man might have belonged to him before the concept of Willy’s Chocolate Experience was ever a glimmer in his eye.

But… Coull is a man of many hats. His long resume and laundry list of academic achievement is “impressive”, and the vitriol he managed to engender from Glasgow’s charitable sector is nothing short of amazing with the way he bungled the Gowanbank Hub. But, on top of being a top-tier life coach, sigma-male giga-chad hustler, and the aspiring Mother Theresa of Glasgow’s downtrodden, he’s also an author. Take a look at his Amazon author’s page. Though his Amazon page now bears a blank biography, the About the Author blurb has been preserved on Google Books.

Meet Billy Coull, the enigmatic wordsmith hailing from the bustling streets of Glasgow, Scotland. A rising star in the literary world, Billy weaves spellbinding tales that delve into the mysterious realms of fictional thrillers and gripping conspiracies. Drawing inspiration from contemporary events, his novels offer readers an electrifying journey into the heart of modern intrigue.

With each stroke of his pen, Billy Coull crafts narratives that blur the lines between reality and fiction, leaving readers enthralled by the unpredictable twists and turns that lie ahead. His passion for storytelling breathes life into characters who grapple with shadows of doubt and navigate labyrinthine plots, captivating audiences across the globe.

Prepare to be drawn into a world of pulse-pounding suspense and unyielding tension as you embark on a literary adventure with Billy Coull, the mastermind behind mind-bending thrillers and intricate conspiracies that will leave you spellbound and hungry for more. Get ready to immerse yourself in stories that challenge perceptions, ignite the imagination, and keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last page.

Sounds a bit… robotic. Self-indulgent. Masturbatory, even. After all, labeling oneself a rising star in the literary world who’s captivating audiences across the globe is a mighty hefty claim for a man who’s been writing for… oh, less than a full calendar year.

That’s right - Coull only decided to begin blessing the laity with his literary gifts in the summer of 2023, less than a scant year ago as of this writing. But, mayhaps that glowing praise is not unwarranted. You see, most astonishing of all, the enigmatic wordsmith (lol) published not one, not two, not even ten books. No - the man published seventeen full-length novels. In four months. Really.

Now, I know what you’re thinking - how? How could one man manage to churn out so many novels in such a short period of time? Well, there’s the possibility that he’s been writing for years for personal enjoyment. Believe it or not, I have five unpublished novels I’ve been sitting on myself, since I just… have this feeling that the world is not quite ready for them, yet. But those took me years to write. Each one, once finished, I laboriously edited, printing them out sheet by sheet and pouring over them, line by line, agonizing over the diction down to the most minute word. But, like I said - that took years to do for five novels, the longest of which didn’t exceed four hundred pages.

Now, at risk of sounding braggadocious - I’m a prolific writer. I write a lot, and I write fast. I spend a lot of my free time writing, and when I’m not, I’m usually thinking about what I want to write, because if I don’t, then I get bored, and when I’m bored, I might experience the vaguest inkling of a negative emotion, and when that happens, well… much like a detonating explosive, it tends to be very unpleasant for everyone in my general vicinity. So, I keep myself busy. And, for all you aspiring writers out there - I’ll let you in on a little secret. Because I like you. If you ever wondered how I keep up such a furious pace, allow me to show you the key to unlocking your true potential.

Smoking tobacco is also a good way to get your gears turning, but, due to smoking being a dirty habit that can only be indulged in while at certain places, this is a good work around.

For five ninety nine at your nearest gas station, the key to unlimited creativity can be yours. You can also buy them in bulk at Costco for cheaper. Trust me, one of these bad boys and a black coffee will leave you feeling like -

Just make sure you’re near a restroom. Your brain will thank you. Your stomach will not.

But, clearly, my tried-and-true method of stimulant abuse is nothing compared to whatever preternatural force Coull has tapped into. For as much and as often as I write, seventeen full-length novels in the span of months - that’s a remarkable achievement. Why, I was even considering forking over a month’s rent for Coull’s life coaching services, just to get a glimpse into his process. Get a little of that secret sauce for myself, y’know? Clearly, the man has unlocked some sort of latent creative chakra that has enabled him to turn out a remarkably vast output of literary works in a shockingly brief period of time. I would venture to guess that the muses themselves are standing over his shoulder as he sits at his desk, crooning honeyed words into his ear as he feverishly transcribes their haunting songs to text.

Coull’s output is varied. He cites Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code fame as his favorite author, and even recommends his books on his author’s page. The other one - the book that changed his life - is one of his own. How humble.

Most of his books seem to follow a similar tack to Brown’s, focusing on shadowy cabals, secret organizations, and dark, sinister global conspiracies, squarely in the thriller genre. They’re a bit, um… well, generic sounds a bit harsh. But, hey, we can’t be too hard on the guy. After all, the dude’s pumping out books like their going out of style. So what if he reuses a plot or two along the way? Maybe the muses just have a lot of ideas for the tepid thrillers that all just happen to feature bland white women with Anglophone names where they fight evil secret societies and unravel conspiracy theories? Maybe they have a thing for self-insert? Not to speak ill of such venerable figures, but I have it on pretty good authority that Clio isn’t exactly the most original storyteller. She’s the muse of history, not the muse of entertainment. Her prose is dryer than a Popeye’s biscuit. Or so I’m told.

And, no, Polyhymnia did not pay me to say that. She loves her sister very much and is not at all trying to make Clio look bad. Just trust me.

But, after much praying, burning incense, and more than a few animal sacrifices, I did manage to get my girl Poly to return my calls and stop leaving me on read and, once she got a few Chili’s presidentes in her, she let me in on a little secret. Y’see, I asked her - Yo. Poly. How the Hell is this Coull fella pullin’ this off? What’s the deal? He’s makin’ me look bad! I feel like I’m losing my mind over here.

Are you really gonna make me spell it out for you? she asked. When I said yes, she called me a few unflattering names, she took out her phone, tapped in a few words into Google, and bade me to behold the elusive identity of Coull’s enigmatic muse.

I really should have seen that one coming.

And, all jokes and hyperbole aside, anyone with a functioning brain could put two and two together and recognize that there is absolutely no possible way short of divine intervention that a single man who’s never published so much as a pamphlet could just suddenly shit out seventeen full-length books onto Amazon in the span of a few months. It’s very convenient that the ChatGPT’s consumer model was made available to the public in November of 2022 and, less than a half-a-year later, Coull is suspiciously dropping the hottest literary fire to ever grace Amazon. As if that questionable timing wasn’t suspect enough, the books themselves - so far as anyone who’s actually read them reports - are riddled with the kind of nonsensical errors in both prose and narrative structure that only an AI could make. Human incompetence, while boundless, is very distinct. The same can be said for those of generative AI. All of Coull’s books are currently (and conveniently) unavailable for purchase on Amazon, so I can’t read them to see for myself, but author Nick Carlson managed to snag a copy of one and posted a review to YouTube. I strongly recommend you give this a watch once you finish this article, if not for the humorous coverage of Coull’s shit ‘book’ - which I really shouldn’t even justify by calling a book, because it’s not - but because of the impassioned speech Carlson gives at the end, pertaining to the current AI-pocalypse, the impact of its having on art and culture, and the dire consequences that will follow outsourcing the creation of it to machines.

I want to touch on that in a moment, but, before we do, I want to wrap up the discussion of Billy Coull.

The reason I even sat down to write this article was not because I was thoroughly tickled by the trash fire that was Willy’s Chocolate Experience. I actually thought about writing something about it the week that it happened, but I decided against it; a wise move, given how much information has been revealed in the intervening time. No - what spurred me to write this was Coull’s interview, in which he apologizes for the entire fiasco.

My life is ruined. 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 even claims that he had to cancel his dream wedding, which was due to be funded by the event, due to handing out refunds to the affected parties.

I was hoping for an event that would be joyful and happy. I wanted people to experience happiness.

He insists that the effort was sincere, and that he was simply out of his depth when it came to organizing and arranging such an event. And, yeah - I can buy that much. Clearly, even if this was not intended to be an out-and-out grift, he severely overestimated the ease with which it could be pulled off.

But there is no way - none - that Coull could have ever realistically hoped to translate what was promised through his AI-generated marketing material, into reality. Not even remotely.

This?

This is not the result of someone was sincerely trying. This is not the result of someone who actually cared. If Coull truly, honestly wanted this experience to resemble even a fraction of what he supposedly envisioned it being, he would have called it off well in advance when it became abundantly clear that it would fail to meet even the barest semblance of what he wanted it to be. He didn’t even buy the fucking candy that was supposed to be there. It seems to me that the least he could have done was run down to the corner store and get some bags of cheap sweets.

But, I’ll admit - I’ve never organized an event like this. Never want to. Hopefully never will.

Yet, if you look at Coull’s history - or perhaps his rap sheet - it becomes abundantly clear that he has a long history of sketchy operations, dubious claims, and, obviously, he has no compunctions against using AI-generated work, selling it, and passing it off as his own to get some quick cash.

Now, I don’t think Billy Coull is evil. Stupid? Possibly. Greedy? Yes. Opportunistic? Definitely. But evil? That’s probably too strong a term. It’s debatable, yes - it can’t be demonstrably proven that much of the donations he solicited with his time at the Gowanbank Hub went into his pocket, but one has to wonder where it all ended up. And that’s not me giving Billy Boy the benefit of the doubt - he’s done enough to prove that he doesn’t even warrant proper consideration for it. I’m just hesitant to stick a label that charged to someone who, at worst, is a run-of-the-mill con-man when there are much worse people who should probably be swinging from the end of a rope. If you start calling every dipshit petty criminal evil, you dilute the term when it’s applied to a guy who’s ideal weekend hobby involves downing a couple cold ones on the porch, maybe a nice dinner out, and then killing a hooker and tossing her body in a dumpster behind the neighborhood Applebee’s.

Coull made the following claim - “I am not a scam artist, I am not a con man or anything like that.”

To which I say - no, Billy. That is certifiably not true. Even if we ignore the glaring, sucking chest wound of Willy’s Chocolate Experience from your history, and all of the shady charity work you engaged in, you still published loads of fake books to Amazon that you didn’t make, that were not good, barely legible, and straight, subpar garbage, and hoped that people would buy them for twenty fucking dollars a piece without ever disclosing the fact that all of them were not authored by you, but ChatGPT. That, by definition, is a scam.

This is to say nothing of the fact that pretty much everything else in his resume is, at best, a generously exaggerated half-truths.

Billy Coull is a grifter. He’s a huckster. He’s a con-man. A scammer, a swindler, a chisler, a cheat, a liar, and a fraud, and has a history and a reputation to back it up. I firmly believe that he thought he could bag the money from this event and run. I believe that, had he gotten away with it, he’d have done it again. Clearly, he was setting up the House of Illuminati with grand aspirations. Even if he did intend for the event to be more than it was, it was never going to be what he promised it to be, and there is no possible chance that he was unaware of that. If he had a shred of honest intentions, he would have never gone through with it.

Like I said at the beginning - I’m a person who likes to give others the benefit of the doubt. I think it’s right to afford those grace when they make mistakes. Even if someone did something wrong, and knowingly so, they can make amends. But, given his shady track record, I do not think that he should be afforded the benefit of the doubt in this case, I absolutely do not think that his apology is sincere, and I would not trust him with so much as a dime in the future. I think that if Coull’s truly sorry for anything, it’s only that he got caught, and suffered the consequences accordingly.

Billy Coull’s life is not over. He’s not an old man. He can do good things with the time he has left. And, for his sake, I hope that he does. I hope that Coull takes this as a wake up call and stops his shady behavior and does something worthwhile. And, to give credit where credit is due, Coull has worked to refund all the affected parties to his own detriment… though, one can justifiably suspect he’s doing so only under threat of legal action rather than sympathy. Let me reiterate - I do not think Coull is a truly evil person. He didn’t kill anyone. He didn’t ruin anyone’s life… except for his own, possibly. Even the aforementioned activist, Donna, from the TFN article, said this about the man:

They were claiming to be welfare officers, they were messing up people’s benefits. They didn’t have a clue. Others had to resolve and recover people’s claims. There was a lot of deprivation and families were trying to apply for help, but Billy and his team unprofessionally went in to help and what they did was make things worse.
When they closed their doors nobody spoke about them again, but there were rumours about what they had done. I’m not sure if anyone believed there was criminality, I think for most of us. He made outlandish claims - everything he said was nonsense. We just feel, collectively, that it was more delusional behaviour than criminal.

Perhaps Coull’s heart was in the right place. Maybe his intentions were and always have been misguided, but ultimately good. Stranger things have happened. Road to Hell, good intentions - you know the refrain. Maybe he’s just an idealist that has a chronic habit of getting in over his head.

But… I kind of doubt it. Which ever way you choose to interpret his story, for good or for ill, the facts speak for themselves. Billy Coull is not a trustworthy person. Not at all.

Harsh? Perhaps. But I think that Willy’s Chocolate Experience is a precursor to what may yet come. I think Coull is but one of thousands of avaricious and opportunistic shysters who see the rise of generative AI as a new and untapped frontier for all sorts of untowards scams, grifts, and schemes. Coull’s antics, whether the product of ineptitude or malice, should still be met with proportionate but harsh consequences, if only to serve as an example of what can, will, and should happen to others if they abuse this technology in the future.

Obviously, I’m not calling for Coull to be publicly crucified, or stand trial, or be banished from polite society. I don’t think he’s done anything so grave as to warrant his excommunication from the civilized world. His partner - who he was supposed to marry - fucking left him over this (if you believe his story, which, I mean… who knows). He’s now roundly considered the most hated man in Glasgow, his name will be synonymous with the word scam, and his event will go down alongside other failed, mismanaged, and ill-fated debacles such as Fyre Festival, Las Pegasus Unicon¹, and DashCon.

And, if you know anything about the legendary misfire that was DashCon… well, that just might be punishment enough.

Someone pissed in that ball pit at some point.

We’re entering a new and uncertain era of internet history. While it’s often hard to draw clear lines of delineation between one cultural epoch and the next, there are times at which the dividing lines become obliquely clear. The Eternal September of 1994 opening the gates of the internet to the masses, and was widely considered the end of the original internet as it had been known up until that time. The Lifeline Assistance program’s expansion (also known as the Obamaphone Act) pried those gates even wider in 2008, and is arguably one of, if not the flashpoint that ensured that people who never would (and perhaps never should) have overcome the previous barriers-to-entry of the internet easily flouted them². ChatGPT’s launch in November of 2022 will serve as one of these definitive, identifiable sea changes that irrevocably altered the entire medium on a fundamental level. I think that the release of ChatGPT to the public was the day that the internet, as it had been known for decades, went from dying to dead.

But, that’s something we’ll be talking about… next time.

1. Las Pegasus Unicon was a My Little Pony-centric fan convention held in - of course - Las Vegas in 2013. While lesser known than the other two honorable mentions, I honestly think it was a shit-show that eclipses DashCon. I mean, at DashCon, the lead voice actress for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic wasn’t almost killed due to staff negligence.

2. Facebook’s launch in 2006 could be said to have had similar impact.