SUNGKYUNKWAN UNIVERSITY (SKKU), SEOUL, KOREA

"A gentle wind blows through autumn leaves. The sound of moon and stars crossing deepens the longing." Believe it or not, that was written by an AI. When entering "autumn arrives" in the AI Writing Software Program, the AI started generating stylish and coherent text, finishing the sentence off with "lovers floating in the pitch black night that is almost within my grasp."

Sungkyunkwan University was the first university in Korea to hold an AI Writing Contest which was called "Ai x Bookathon" at the Natural Sciences Campus for the 2 days from November 21^st to November 22^nd. This contest utilized a hackathon format, which is a portmanteau of the words "hack" and "marathon". A hackathon's goal is to create a finished functioning product without a break within a limited timeframe. The contest ran for 25 hours starting from 3 PM on November 21 till 4:30 PM the next day.

The participants were asked to input a variety of texts from classics, essays, and SNS (Social Network Services), with the AI formulating the next sentences and words. The AI used in the contest was OpenAI's model "GPT-2", which was developed by an American non-profit research laboratory based in San Francisco, California. GPT-2 has the ability to write from the raw text data using no task-specific training data.