Woman felt ‘misled’ by local hackathon event

On Monday (15 June), a TikTok user said she felt her weekend had been “wasted” after joining a local hackathon.

Her video showed other participants writing their answers on paper, despite hackathons being known as events where participants create computer programmes to solve specific problems in a short period of time.

Later, she revealed the event as the Ctrl+HERITAGE Youth Symposium and Hackathon, held in Chinatown on 13 and 14 June.

The Original Poster (OP) also expressed that she felt “heavily misled”, as the hackathon “was not what was advertised”.

Event allegedly used AI-generated visuals

In her first video, the OP cited some of the red flags she observed regarding the event.

Firstly, she claimed that her group’s mentor was only there for an hour as he was “busy with work”.

According to the website, the event ran over the weekend, from 9am to 6pm on both days.

Additionally, the OP said the event’s key visuals, which were shown on their website and on T-shirts, were AI-generated.

This is despite it being a creative hackathon.

On the morning of 17 June, MS News visited the event website and found some AI-generated visuals, as the OP had shown in a subsequent video.

However, in the afternoon, these were updated to photos from the event.