Torlei Tech: All About AI wins Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s 2024 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s 16th District

When asked what inspired the creation of Torlei Tech: All About AI, the students said, “We were inspired to create this app because of the increasing use of AI, which has resulted in difficulty in verifying whether an image was AI-generated, specifically when trying to complete school assignments. One of the team members, Leila Saxby, did research over this past summer on public sentiment of AI-generated art and their ability to discern when AI tools were used. She found that people tend to assume that most high-quality art is human-generated, so it can be difficult to notice when images are AI-generated. Additionally, Almost every school in New York, if not all, has rules against the use of AI in school assignments, but with the growing use of AI for everyday tasks in our society, it is becoming harder and harder to ignore the resource, even if you try to. Many of our teachers would warn us and our peers about avoiding AI-generated photos, but they were consistently unable to provide us with a free-for-use and reliable way to do so. Finding a reliable way to verify how your source/image was created was becoming increasingly necessary. Last year, the CollegeBoard Computer Science AP Exams allowed the use of AI under the following condition: it is under 30% of your total code and you clearly cite where it is used; this year, our school has allowed us to use AI, not to write our essays or to complete our school work, but to generate images that are not available online, to assist with research if clearly cited, and the total use of AI is less than 30% of the total assignment. Once again, this new development served as even more of an incentive for us to develop an app that can detect whether an image is AI, not just to declare the image as fraudulent immediately but to accurately cite it and use it for our research if necessary. Our app provides much-needed relief from these challenges, making the process more manageable and less stressful.”