That’s pretty wild. What was the reason behind failing ethics review?
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.
I might be biased in terms of the safety profile, my background is materials and chemistry, and there are loads of ways you can get into trouble if you don’t really have experience in the materials and synthesis routes you’re working with
One example I’ve heard of from my field (alloy design) is an ML model that suggested an composition high in Magnesium - perfectly reasonable if you’re interested in lightweight strong alloys, but the synthesis method was arc melting, which is a high risk for starting a metal fire if you aren’t careful because Mg has a low vapor pressure
If you’re doing organic chemistry it’s maybe even worse because there can be all kinds of side products or runaway exothermic reactions, and if you’re doing novel chemistry it might take deep experience in the field to know of those things are likely
All these concerns are manageable, but I think an ethics review panel would want to at least see that there is a reasonable safety review process in place before letting students try out random experiments in topic areas in which the models likely haven’t been fine tuned with safety in mind.
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.