(Yicai) Nov. 12 -- Chinese streaming site iQiyi has held the award ceremony for its first Artificial Intelligence Short Film Creation Competition, handing winners a total of 11 awards.

The competition attracted submissions from 2,300 creators from more than 30 countries. Eleven of them received prizes during a ceremony held by iQiyi on Nov. 10, with one first prize, three second prizes, five third prizes, and special awards for best creative and best narration works.

Submissions for the contest kicked off on July 15. Contestants participating had to send short films one to five minutes long, created mainly with two leading AI tools: ByteDance’s Doubao video generation model Seedance 1.0 Pro and Google’s Veo 3.

The first-prize winner was a short movie titled ‘Under the Fireworks Lies My Home’ by Chen Youxue, a traditional filmmaker with over a decade of experience. He said at the ceremony that it took him just 10 days to complete the short movie.

“AI makes it possible to realize ideas that couldn’t be filmed before,” Chen said. “It turns concepts that could be written but were hard to shoot into reality.”

Two of the three second-prize winners were ‘A Tree’s Fantasy’ by Wen Ye and ‘Alaya’ by Pan Yu.

Human-AI competitions will become a norm, as AI will help break the constraints of human overthinking and push us beyond our capabilities, Pan noted. Transcendence is AI’s greatest inspiration, but coexistence will remain its unchanging premise, he added.

“No matter how powerful AI becomes, it is still humans who drive it,” said Li Dan, the representative of the team behind ‘White Steed,’ one of the AI short films winning the third prize in the competition. “Human emotion remains the most precious element.”

The competition attracted strong interest not only from creators in the animation, movie, and publishing industries, but also from individual creators and fans. “These AI short films prove that a professional background is no longer a barrier to creation in the AI era,” said Wen, who works as a full-time designer.

Several gaming and comic studios also submitted works, Yicai learned. The head of a Hangzhou-based animation firm said it participated to see how good AI drama can get, and admitted it plans to explore this type of content further in the future to reduce production costs.

After seeing the AI short videos submitted to iQiyi for the competition, Jennie Shi, AI technical specialist at Google Cloud, said she was deeply impressed. “If someone tells me today that AI works have no soul, I think that they are biased toward AI,” she noted.

“Don’t wait for AI to be perfect before you start,” Shi suggested to creators.

IQiyi has been investing in AI since 2018, said Xie Danming, vice president and head of the company’s Intelligent Platform Department. It has already rolled out internal production tools that integrate large language model capabilities directly into its content workflow, Xie explained.

“The AI wave is an opportunity,” iQiyi’s Senior VP Chen Xiao said, stressing that AI will not undermine the firm’s long video strengths but rather “bring content creation and creativity truly together in a more focused and efficient way.”

“This contest was not an end but a beginning,” Xie pointed out. In fact, iQiyi launched the AI Theater section at the streaming platform's website for all audience, aiming to bring AI-generated drama from experimental labs to mainstream viewers.

The AI Theater will focus on films over 15 minutes long, targeting one of the most challenging areas of traditional film and television production, said Zhu Liang, VP and head of iQiyi’s Intelligent Production Department.

“Taking action matters more than standing still,” Zhu noted. “AI is giving rise to a new audiovisual language, not just an upgrade in film technology, but a comprehensive reshaping of production processes, aesthetic paradigms, and organizational structures.”

AI Theater will serve as a dedicated content channel to help cultivate user viewing habits. IQiyi is advancing AI applications across multiple content types, including animation, comics, drama, and films, with children’s programming expected to become a key breakthrough area, according to Li Zhen, head of the company’s Dali Studio.

“China should be the place with the highest concentration of AI creators,” said Chen Youxue. “I hope to see more new AI waves rising on iQiyi that can inspire the next generation to keep innovating.”

Editor: Futura Costaglione