Aided by an original artificial intelligence program, Harvey Mudd College rising sophomores Leah Uriarte, Nicole Ge, Wendi Zheng and Zachary Wood, brought home top honors in the sentient chat agent challenge category and the award for best creative industries and ethical content use at the 2025 SoCal AI Responsibility Summit at UCLA.

The team developed and entered FairUseBot, “an AI-powered legal assistant designed to help content creators identify fair use and copyright-free materials,” according to news release at hmc.edu. “The tool offers personalized guidance and generates citations tailored to users ranging from students to social media influencers.”

“One challenge we overcame was finding time to build when we were also busy with classes,” Uriarte wrote in a statement. “But we managed to work through it together. It was also really fun to learn new technologies, like Retrieval Augmented Generation and working extensively with Gemini, Google’s LLM.”

The trip was sponsored by the college’s Code the Change club and Mudd Exploring Careers in Tech.