[Edaily Reporter Kang Min-koo ] The “Youth AI Shorts Festival,” co-hosted by LG Uplus(032640)and YouTube, garnered a positive response with a total of 5,009 entries submitted.

The “Youth AI Shorts Festival” is a short-form video contest organized by LG Uplus and YouTube to discover creative talent for the AI era and promote a culture of content creation using generative artificial intelligence (AI). Held for the second time this year following last year’s event, the contest took place from June 8 to July 31 as part of the “National AI Competition,” a public participation AI contest organized by the Ministry of Science and ICT.

This year’s contest featured the “Simply” category, where participants used Google’s generative AI model Gemini and other tools to express their unique personalities and identities, and the “Arts” category, where participants created creative content centered on the theme of “voice.”

To lower the psychological barrier to using generative AI and enable anyone to try their hand at creating AI content, LG Uplus hosted offline pop-up exhibitions and AI Educator Classes on its participatory art platform, “U+ The Gap Between the Ordinary and the Extraordinary.” Over 3,000 people visited during the event period.

A total of 331 aspiring creators participated in the AI Educator Classes, which were held 15 times throughout the contest period. The classes consisted of programs tailored to different skill levels, from beginner to advanced, and provided step-by-step, hands-on training ranging from prompt writing to actual video production.

Judging for this contest was conducted by experts in content and storytelling, AI creativity, and AI technology and academia. The judging panel commented, “As befits a Shorts video contest with over 5,000 participants, we were able to see a wide variety of genres and high-quality works even within the same theme,” adding, “We were particularly impressed by how participants developed the unique expressive potential of AI through their own creative direction.”

The winning entries were praised for demonstrating how generative AI can lower the barrier to entry for creativity and expand new possibilities for expression. Kim Su-bin, a student in the Film Department at Seoul Institute of the Arts, presented a work that utilized AI to bring the fantasy genre to life—a genre she had previously found difficult to attempt due to production costs.

Visual artist Kim Ki-ram expressed his reflections on “humanity” through a work combining voice and AI. Additionally, creator Ju Jae-hoon incorporated the babbling of his actual 11-month-old son into his piece; in this way, the winners each used generative AI to bring their own experiences and stories to life in novel ways.

The winners will participate in a 6-night, 8-day AI training program next month, visiting Google’s offices in San Francisco and DataLand in Los Angeles—the world’s first AI museum. The winning works are also scheduled to be exhibited at “U+ The Gap Between the Ordinary and the Extraordinary,” which is set to open on September 16.

Kim Da-rim, Head of Marketing Communications at LG Uplus, stated, “The Youth AI Shorts Festival is a program designed to help more young people experience generative AI in an easy and familiar way and express themselves through their own content.” She added, “We will continue to expand the AI creative ecosystem through collaboration with various partners and create opportunities for future creators to grow.”