South Korea’s LG Uplus and YouTube jointly hosted the “Youth AI Shorts Festival,” a generative AI short-form video contest that received a total of 5,009 submissions. Now in its second year, the event has been praised for going beyond a simple competition by combining AI education and hands-on production experience to expand the general public’s use of generative AI into content creation.
LG Uplus announced the submission results on the 23rd. The contest ran from June 8 to July 31 as part of the “National AI Competition,” a public participation AI event organized by South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT. Participants submitted works in two categories: “Simply,” where they used Google’s generative AI model Gemini to express their personality and identity, and “Arts,” where they created content centered on the theme of voice.
LG Uplus went beyond simply accepting submissions by also running educational programs where participants could directly experience generative AI. The company held offline pop-up exhibitions and AI Educator Classes at “U+Daily Life Gap,” its participatory art platform, with more than 3,000 people visiting the venue during the event period. A total of 331 aspiring creators participated in 15 AI Educator Class sessions. The courses were structured by skill level, from beginner to advanced, with step-by-step hands-on training covering everything from prompt writing to actual video production.
Judging was conducted by experts in content and storytelling, AI creativity, and AI technology and academia. The panel included Kim Da-eun, a YouTube creator and AI film director; Lee Mun-hyung, professor of software convergence at Hanyang Women’s University; and Ji Hye-cheon, CEO of JUNTO, an AI advertising and content studio. The judges commented, “As befits a shorts video contest with over 5,000 participants, we encountered a wide variety of genres and high-quality works even within the same themes,” adding, “It was impressive to see participants develop AI’s unique expressive possibilities into their own directorial styles.”
Among the winning works, notable examples stood out where generative AI enabled forms of expression that would have been cost-prohibitive or technically challenging using traditional production methods. Kim Su-bin, a film student at Seoul Institute of the Arts, used AI to realize a fantasy genre that would have been difficult to attempt due to production cost burdens. Visual artist Kim Ki-ram combined voice with AI to express reflections on “what it means to be human.” Creator Joo Jae-hoon incorporated the babbling of his 11-month-old son into his work, earning recognition for creativity and AI utilization skills.
A total of 11 winners, including recipients of the Minister of Science and ICT Award and other grand prize winners, will participate in an eight-day, seven-night AI training program in the United States next month. They are scheduled to visit Google’s San Francisco office and Data Land, the world’s first AI museum in Los Angeles, to experience the global AI ecosystem and latest technology trends firsthand.
Winning works will also be exhibited at “U+Daily Life Gap,” which reopens on the 16th of next month. LG Uplus plans to revamp the space into a participatory art platform where emerging artists and audiences grow together. The company has been expanding programs that allow users to directly participate in AI content creation, including a participatory event last month on U+tv Kids Land where AI fairy tales were created based on customer stories.
Kim Da-rim, head of marketing communications at LG Uplus, said, “This is a program designed to help more young people experience generative AI easily and familiarly, and express themselves through their own content.” She added, “We will continue to expand the AI creative ecosystem and create opportunities for future creators to grow.”