Startup Claims MIT Endorsement After Attending Hackathon
In a predictable yet glorious overreach that has rattled the boundaries of self-promotion and delusion, AI-powered “ArticNova” has proudly displayed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) logo on its homepage under the header “Backed by the Best.”
Minimal effort from this outlets, unpaid tech desk has revealed that the endorsement, stemmed from nothing more than the founders' brief attendance at a student-run hackathon on campus in 2019.
“We were physically within MIT’s gravitational field for 36 hours,” said ArticNova’s CEO and Chief Visionary Alignment Officer, Algernon Blaze. “That kind of proximity to genius is more than enough to qualify as a strategic alliance in today’s fast-moving innovation economy”.
MIT, when contacted, clarified that the hackathon was open to the public and explicitly unaffiliated with institutional sponsorship. “We allow people to use the bathroom in our buildings too”, said one staff member. “That doesn’t mean we endorse their startups”.
The company’s homepage features a glowing, animated version of the MIT logo rotating slowly next to others like NASA (whom they tagged in a meme once) and Wired (whose blog they once bookmarked).
“MIT’s whole deal is innovation, right?” he explained. “And we innovate by retroactively aligning with excellence”.
Asked if they had considered removing the logo after being contacted by MIT's legal team, Blaze responded, “We’re pivoting to Web3, where the concept of copyright doesn’t exist. In the metaverse, we all went to MIT.”
