I don’t know if this story had much traction in social media as I’m not a participant. There’s been no discussion on the Genii or Magician’s Forums. Erik Tait and Nick Locapo discussed it briefly on the Penguin podcast and UK magician, Caven Booth, posted a YouTube video. It’s strange that there hasn’t been more buzz, more controversy as one of Magic’s biggest players is the culprit.
A friend sent me this post from Studio52, the company run by UK magician, Ben Earl. Ben is extremely talented and, from reading his books and studying some of his videos, a great guy. He’s devoted to the members of his online community, the Family. He seems to be the kind of person you’d want to spend time with.

This was followed up with this post:

Needless to say, Ben is justifiably angry. In the next day, he posted this:
While I sincerely hope this was an unintentional error, this incident raises serious concerns about the practices employed. At best, it shows negligence; at worst, it suggests deliberate misrepresentation. Either scenario undermines the credibility of Murphy’s promotional efforts.
To give Murphy’s some credit, once contacted, they acted swiftly to remove the quote from their page before informing other shops to do the same. However, the cat was already out of the bag, many sales had been made and countless emails had already been sent to prospective customers.
In light of this, I feel obligated to caution both creators and consumers alike. Creators, I urge you to diligently verify that your names and statements are not being misused or misattributed in promotional materials. Likewise, consumers should exercise caution and critically evaluate the authenticity of testimonials and endorsements.
As he says, there’s no undo button on this. Murphy’s is guilty of intentionally misleading their customers or too busy pushing products to attend to their work. However there’s a lot more to unpack here.
Despite the propaganda around AI, it’s not that good to be able to write a full ad complete with pull quotes. AI uses existing material to draw from; creating something brand new isn’t its forte (yet). It takes what it’s been fed and spits out some content based on the input. In the Penguin podcast, Erik Tait casts doubt on whether one could actually get AI to write a marketing advertisement as it takes skill and experience. Humans still have the market cornered on originality.
Magic dealers have always been a bit deceptive about their products. After all, it’s not real magic. We’ve all bought a trick that fooled us and upon opening the package, had our dreams of this being our next miracle dashed. It’s tossed aside and off we go in search of the next miracle. Dealers thrive on this cycle.
Magic dealers are not our friends. Sure we get nice thank you videos for our purchases from J-Andi but everyone gets that same video. It’s marketing. Their job is to sell us stuff. They don’t care about our growth, progress, or success in magic. They want to sell more products. It’s no different than any other business.
I am not advocating that you stop buying magic products. I’m advocating that you take the flood of promotion and hype with a grain of salt. Take a breath and pause before hitting the Buy Now button. If you need to click a button, add it to your wishlist and see if you still want it after a day or two. Lastly, we all need to remember this phrase believed to originate in 1603: Caveat emptor.