Reading more about this, I think there's some reasonable doubt that stipends make sense. But barring that, it seems obvious to me that AISC should get the funding it needs to pay organizers. I participated as a research lead last camp and was able to effectively able to bring my project from an idea into reality.

I likely wasn't experienced enough to have lead a project in SPAR, but thankfully my application was evaluated largely on my idea and not just my experience, so AISC gave it a chance. Without AISC, I think you're missing a crucial step of taking well-read-but-not-experienced people and giving them a chance to get their foot in the door, to do a concrete project which can then be used to further evaluate them for the next step, like SPAR.

No idea what the counterfactual impact is here, but two of my team members went from "quite interested but not working on AIS day to day" to pivoting to focus on AIS. At least one of them told me that the project was a significant part of taking that step.