A Reflection on Our Buildspace Experience

Over the past six weeks, we've had the opportunity to develop our application in collaboration with Buildspace. They provided us with motivation and materials that have accelerated our progress. Buildspace, as Farza himself - the founder of Buildspace, emphasizes, is not just "a school where you develop your own ideas." After six weeks, 32 projects selected by the jury are announced and compete for the main prize of $25,000 for the top four projects.

The Buildspace program included weekly progress updates, participation in training sessions covering promotion and application development processes, and engaging discussions on Discord forums. We even had the option to work together in San Francisco or Dubai to refine our ideas. It was a valuable time, and we've gleaned numerous lessons throughout this experiment. You can watch a demo of our application here: https://youtu.be/SkJQX2ylh9E

However, as our application bridges the realms of art and technology, we couldn't ignore a surprising verdict. The jury created a special category for musicians but chose not to select any of them for the top 4. Instead, they chose an AI-based music generator application that could be used publicly without licensing. In our opinion, prioritizing AI-generated music apps over the artist's intellectual value and potential raises ethical concerns. Competitions promoting such apps may inadvertently stifle artistic potential by luring artists into a competition with a $25,000 prize while insinuating that creativity, originality, and artistic contributions pale in comparison to AI.

Another aspect that raised our concerns was the inclusion of a project in the finals, which aims to generate smart contracts using AI. Smart contracts play a pivotal role in designing distributed payment systems. We do not endorse AI-generated code, especially in cryptography, where even the slightest bug can result in the loss of all funds. There's also a risk that such generators could be used by fraudsters to create projects intended to defraud investors. As we are all too aware, there is a growing number of such projects, and we do not wish to contribute to such initiatives.

Although we did not make it to the finals, we appreciate being part of this experiment. We eagerly anticipate future editions and extend our best wishes to the 1,000+ projects that participated in the Buildspace program.