MindCraft

MindCraft hosts competitions for creating AI art that serves a particular business purpose, making AI accessible to everyone and leveraging the creativity of the entire internet.

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Inspiration

As college students hoping to enter the workforce soon, we’re intrigued yet frightened by the rapid advancements in AI over the last few months. We wondered how this technology could transform different economic sectors and how we can adapt to these changes. It became obvious that AI models are already extremely powerful and will only become more powerful in the future. Therefore, the biggest bottleneck for AI will be how skilled humans are at finding creative ways to use it. We anticipate generative AI prompt generation to be a crucial skill for the future economy.

During this hackathon, we thought of possible ways to enhance this creative process. We decided that the best way to go about this is to democratize access to AI. Prompt generation is a skill that anyone can have, so we should have as many people as possible brainstorming prompts so that the best ideas rise to the top. MindCraft accomplishes this by allowing anyone to organize a competition for who can create the best work of “functional art.” We use this term to mean any artwork that serves an economic purpose (for example, a TV show script, a brand logo, a videogame character design). We believe that this platform could enable organizations to leverage a virtually unlimited pool of talent, while also giving average people the ability to unleash their creative potential for meaningful purposes.

What it does

On MindCraft, users can create competitions that reward cash prizes to the creator of the most exceptional artwork that fulfills a specific purpose. Participants can browse through a list of contests select the ones that interests them. Then, they can use third party AI tools to create art that meets the specifications of this competition, and upload their submissions for review by the competition organizers. Although AI is not a requirement for any contest, it simplifies and broadens the creative process for a diverse set of skill levels. To make this process even more accessible, MindCraft provides a centralized repository of generative AI tools, instructions on how to use them, and the latest news on AI technology to help contestants win their competitions.

As an example, suppose the climate activist group Extinction Rebellion wants to create a public service announcement (PSA) campaign against the Willow Project, an oil drilling development in Alaska with disastrous environmental consequences. Because of their limited number of volunteers, they can’t afford to hire a public relations company for $50,000. Instead, they create a competition on MindCraft that offers $1,000 to the creator of the best PSA for their cause. Users can find the competition and browse MindCraft’s repository of resources, choose a third-party GAI tool, and create an artwork that meets the guidelines. For instance, they could use Replicate.com’s Stable Diffusion model to draw a picture of “Joe Biden riding on top of a drowning polar bear” and submit it to the competition. The organizers review the submission and reward the winner with $1,000 for their PSA.

How we built it

We used JavaScript, React Native, Expo and the NativeBase UI library to develop the frontend. For the backend, we utilized Node.js and the Express.js framework. For file storage, we relied on AWS S3. Finally, we leveraged Mongoose for object data modeling and MongoDB Atlas to create and manage the cloud database.

Challenges we ran into

The website has many different screens and a complex system of state variables. This made code clarity and organization a challenge, which led to lots of hard-to-find bugs. Also, we were stuck for a while on how to upload files from the frontend, to the backend, to the object storage database, and back to the frontend whenever needed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re very proud of our app’s functionality and close resemblance to what we had initially envisioned. We believe our UI is streamlined and intuitive to use in spite of the app’s complex set of features. Additionally, we’re proud of our idea’s originality and applicability to the present day.

What we learned

We learned how to build web applications using React Native. For one of us, it was their first hackathon, and for both of us, it was our first times building a web app. We learned a lot from translating our skills in mobile app development to web development. Drawing parallels across these two fields let us deepen our knowledge on concepts like navigation and UI design, and working with API’s for file storage forced us to get into the weeds of concepts like internet protocols. Additionally, it was informative to work closely with cutting edge machine learning and research how these tools may be applied to our use cases.

What's next for MindCraft

In the future, we hope to expand functionalities for features we did not have time to implement. We plan on integrating a financial API such as Plaid to administer the cash prizes to winners, and allow users to modify the default images for profile pictures and competition cover photos. We also hope to fully implement our feature of optionally hiding a user’s submissions from other users, and eventually create a search bar for finding relevant competitions. We also registered with Domain.com for MindCraft.tech and want to link the website to this domain name instead of relying on local servers. We also plan to tabularize the tools in the learn tab by categories (e.g. 'text to video', 'text to audio') and integrate Twilio to push email notifications to contestants if they won a project and for a weekly newsletter from the learn tab article conglomeration. We may also want to explore making in-house plugins alongside an in-house test compiler like OpenAI's playground to allow for quick model-to-model movement and minimize additional browser tab traffic.

Most importantly, we plan to bring MindCraft to market by connecting small black-owned businesses of Durham's "black wall street" to Durham's lively art culture. By working for a Durham nonprofit that helps underserved Durham teens and adults start their own business ventures and give back to their own communities, we've seen firsthand the drive and passion of teens and students to learn about emerging technologies like gAI and enthusiasm to seek channels to gain access to technologies that have historically been only accessible to the privileged. Conversely, through our nonprofit experience, we've also been able to identify the biggest pain point for all of Durham's small businesses: brand awareness specifically targeted to genZ. This pattern makes sense since most ventures started in Durham are centered around B2C plays such as mom-and-pop shops, jewelry collections, phone cases, and street fashion, all highly dependent on the genZ appeal. By first connecting the current gig and small business economical landscapes of Durham, we see an important opportunity for MindCraft to prove its model and make an immediate and substantial impact on a place we call home.

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