Hero Awards Launches New Program to Recognize Citizen Activists Using AI and Social Media for Sustainability Goals

The Hero Awards, which has recognized outstanding achievements in pursuit of global sustainability since 2019, has announced a new program aimed at allowing citizen activists to achieve recognition for their efforts through following a standardized format. According to CIO Savannah Partridge, the organization noticed there wasn't a way for everyday heroes to be recognized for devoted efforts toward planetary improvement, leading to the creation of a protocol involving efficient ways of harnessing both AI and social media.

According to Hero Awards Community Officer John Toomey, participants must choose one of the 231 unique global indicators the UN has designated to track progress toward the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. For example, UN Goal 12 is Ensure Sustainable Consumption and Production Patterns, and within Goal 12, Unique Global Indicator 12.3 focuses on halving per capita global food waste at retail and consumer levels by 2030. The complete list of indicators can be found at https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/indicators/indicators-list/ and is also available in PDF format at https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/indicators/Global-Indicator-Framework-after-2024-refinement-English.pdf.

After selecting a global indicator, participants devise AI prompts directed at gleaning the most actionable and useful insights from each AI in the program, which currently includes ChatGPT, Meta's Llama 3.3, Claude 3.5, Perplexity, Gemini 2.0 Flash, Microsoft's Copilot, DeepSeek, and Qwen 2.5-Max. Hero Awards Chief Judge Anna Chu Lin explains that each AI thinks differently, so the skill lies in playing with prompts and iterating until deriving the most powerful answers from each, while drastically reducing the likelihood of unproductive answers through multiple AI verification.

The Hero Awards staff recommends that those wanting to improve their AI prompting skills follow experts like Andrew Ng, Jennifer Strong, Matt Shumer, Riley Goodside, and Santiago Laplagne to increase their likelihood of winning. After receiving answers from the AIs, participants turn the most successful prompts into evocative questions on social media sites including Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, and Douban, testing, refining, and iterating posts until landing on those producing the most intelligent engagement.

Those judged to have achieved the most impactful and goal-furthering content through both AI and social media will be honored with a Hero Award, with winning content publicized extensively and archived. Partridge sees this as democratizing efforts toward planetary preservation and human thriving, noting that while it involves work familiar to many average people, it has potential to build a global mindset showing that change is both possible and personally rewarding through maximizing human and artificial intelligence.