Hacking the Future: Sundai Club’s Generative AI Innovations Fuel Journalism and Beyond

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It's not necessary to use ChatGPT to come up with a list of drawbacks associated with generative artificial intelligence. The unauthorized use of creative content, the perpetuation of harmful biases, and the significant consumption of energy and water for their development are all major concerns.

However, setting aside those concerns momentarily, it's impressive to consider the significant potential of generative AI in creating prototypes for potentially valuable tools.

I had the opportunity to experience this directly by attending Sundai Club, a monthly generative AI hackathon held near the MIT campus on Sundays. A couple of months back, the organizers graciously allowed me to observe a session where they focused on identifying AI tools that could benefit journalists. The club receives support from a Cambridge-based nonprofit, Æthos, which advocates for the ethical use of AI.

The team at Sundai Club is made up of individuals from MIT and Harvard, alongside several skilled developers and product managers, as well as a member from the military. Every gathering kicks off with a creative session to generate project ideas, which is then narrowed down to a singular concept that they endeavor to create.

Highlighted proposals from the journalism hackathon featured leveraging advanced language technologies for monitoring political content on TikTok, automating the creation of requests and appeals for public records, and condensing video recordings of municipal court proceedings, aiding in the coverage of local news.

Ultimately, the team opted to develop a tool designed to assist journalists focusing on artificial intelligence in pinpointing noteworthy studies published on Arxiv, a well-known platform for sharing early versions of research papers. My input during the meeting, specifically mentioning that finding intriguing studies on Arxiv was a top concern for me, probably influenced their decision.

Upon setting a target, the programming team successfully developed a word embedding, which is a numeric model of words and their significances, for Arxiv AI documents by utilizing the OpenAI API. This enabled the examination of the dataset to identify documents pertinent to a specific keyword and to investigate the connections among various research fields.

Leveraging a different word embedding from Reddit conversations and incorporating a Google News search, the programmers developed a visual representation that displays academic articles, Reddit debates, and pertinent news articles together.

The prototype developed, named AI News Hound, is in its early stages but demonstrates the potential of large language models to discover information through innovative methods. Below is a screenshot of the tool in action, searching for the phrase “AI agents.” The two green squares nearest to the clusters of news articles and Reddit posts indicate research studies that might be relevant for an article discussing the development of AI agents.

A tool such as AI News Hound could be beneficial for journalists, as well as researchers or venture capitalists, in pinpointing potential projects, teams, or people for engagement.

Nader Karayanni, who is pursuing his graduate studies at MIT and frequently participates in the Sundai Club coding marathons, mentions how language models and other types of generative AI significantly simplify the process of developing prototype concepts such as this. "It's astounding how swiftly we were able to create that," Karayanni remarks. "Had you informed me three years prior that we could achieve this, I would have deemed it unfeasible."

The Sundai Club has also created other innovative projects, such as an artificial intelligence tool designed for conducting market analysis, a game created by AI that teaches the mechanics of hackathons, and notably, a unique application that transforms academic papers into TikTok videos.

Gabriela Torres Vives, a key figure behind Sundai Club, mentions that their hackathon events are expanding. She expresses a desire to work alongside businesses for larger-scale endeavors moving forward. Torres Vives emphasizes the importance of innovative and rapid approaches to problem-solving, as opposed to conventional engineering methods. "Our focus is on making the application of AI to address actual issues enjoyable, while ensuring that our concepts are designed to meet genuine needs and attract potential users,” she explains.

The artificial intelligence initiatives developed by the Sundai Club likely share similarities with the early-stage projects of various organizations, in the sense that they are rudimentary and have not yet evolved into groundbreaking applications or strategic business models. However, I believe they demonstrate the capability of generative AI to swiftly generate intriguing new concepts.

Additionally, numerous news outlets are justifiably concerned about the potential for generative AI to interfere with their industry—through content theft, the creation of automated spam articles, and redirecting search engine users. However, the hackathon I participated in indicates that this technology could also offer significant benefits for journalism.

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