USC student uses AI to come with definitive list of best frats and sororities

A University of Southern California student used artificial intelligence to come up with a “definitive” list of best fraternities and sororities that’s sure to only spark more Greek life debates.Tomoki Chien, a USC journalism student who runs the Morning Trojan newsletter, said he used AI to scrape thousands of anonymous social media posts because he was “sick” of seeing rankings of the university’s frats and sororities on Sidechat — an anonymous social media platform popular on college campuses.“So to put the issue to rest, I scraped the more than 140,000 posts on USC’s Sidechat server, fed them into a large language model that pulled out rankings, then used code and AI-aided data analysis to calculate the overall scores,” Chien wrote.The top three fraternities, according to Chien’s analysis, are TKE, Pike and Sig Chi.The top three sororities are DG, Kappa and Theta.“The overall rankings largely comport with popular understandings of the hierarchy of houses — one that is often cynically attributed to wealth and attractiveness for sororities, and party-throwing prowess for frats,” he said.Of the 140,000-plus Sidechat posts, Chien slimmed his data down using Chat GPT just to posts explicitly ranking Greek life on campus using criteria typical for rating frats and sororities.For example, he didn’t use posts that ranked houses on “wokeness” but included “faciest pledge classes” and “best parties.”“Notably, of the 790 Sidechat posts identified as ranking Greek life, three-quarters ranked only frats,” he said.There were some fluctuations between the top frats and sororities semester-by-semester going back to fall 2023, but most of the top houses were “relatively stable” in their rankings. The ZBT fraternity has seen its stock steadily increase while others, like the AXO sorority, have seen steady drops, Chien found....