I'm generally a proponent of AI and LLM but to me the decision was the right one. You are tasking people with implementing an idea generated by an algorithmic model with (I'm guessing) zero oversight that might have very little training that teaches it the importance of coming up with ideas worth implementing. Some may be more useful than others so it won't be fair from an accomplishment or motivation point of view.
Imagine you've already invested time going to this event and want to win the prize/credit but to do so you have to implement a plugin that makes webpages grayscale because of a random idea generator. Maybe some people would find that interesting but others would see it as wasting their time.
Individual ideas can be subject to Ethical Review Board approvals and that should go for a hackathon project same as any study proposed in Academia or drug trial etc -- but to apply some wavey handed lum sum out of bounds lable just based on source seems like arbitrary opinionated overreach.
How do you make sure the participants are well informed? What if an idea suggested by a model turns out to be dangerous to implement, but nobody at the hackathon has quite the relevant experience to notice?
No, I'm asking for an example of an idea that an LLM might produce that is too dangerous to implement but nobody at the hackathon has the relevant experience to notice. You can shut down any endeavour by imagining boogeymen that aren't actually real.
One obvious problem is, what if the ideas were obviously unethical?
I would personally let this pass ethics if someone read all the generated ideas, and took personal responsibility for them passing the basic ethics rules, or got them through the ethics committee if required, exactly the same as they would their own ideas.
Imagine you've already invested time going to this event and want to win the prize/credit but to do so you have to implement a plugin that makes webpages grayscale because of a random idea generator. Maybe some people would find that interesting but others would see it as wasting their time.