INTERNATIONAL AI CREATOR AWARD 2026
Why does this award exist? What does it promise? What will we build next?
The rules are written in the Regulations. What is written here is the will behind them. When something has not yet been built, we say so.
We will do what we write here.
Let's build a new awarding culture in the generative AI creation era
生成AIクリエイティブ時代のアワード文化をつくっていこう
Four years have passed since the open release of Stable Diffusion in 2022.
Under our vision, "Creating People Who Create," we have written books and articles almost every day. We have now published four major books, 28 magazine issues, and more than 1,000 articles.
When we look at X, formerly Twitter, wonderful works pass before our eyes every day. They are shared, bookmarked, and, for a brief moment, receive attention.
Amazing! I love it! So cute! How did they make this…!?
And then they move on at tremendous speed. They are, quite literally, flowing.
These works inspire the creation of new works. They become part of our experience and the cultural ground shared by those of us who love the field of creative AI.
Viewed across the history of media, generative AI appears to be developing simultaneously around the world, unlike painting, photography, commercial art, or publishing arts.
The walls that divided us by language and region are disappearing. In their place, the great icebergs that once separated creative fields are melting, and one vast sea is opening before us.
The people using creative AI may still be traveling in small boats. But those boats give us the freedom to travel anywhere.
A small boat does not have to sail alone. Creators with different cultures, sensibilities, and technologies can each set out in their own vessels, find one another on the same sea, and connect to form a great fleet.
Even the powerful AI technologies and tools held by the world's largest companies are not cargo too heavy for a small boat to carry. The thrust for the voyage ahead, for the challenge ahead, can arrive as API credits. They have a role to play: creating new materials to make work with, new sails and engines, people who can use that fuel — and the ports that send them off on new journeys.
Boarding a single great liner together, one that somebody owns, matters too. To make a large and comfortable voyage as a large organisation, that organisation has to raise its own intelligence. Each person uses AI to melt the walls between them, joins forces, protects one another's challenges, and travels farther in comfort. That is a wonderful thing as well.
What we want to recognise first is a great fleet that every independent, free creator can join in their own boat, steering by their own compass — The Creative Free Fleet.
THE CREATIVE FREE FLEET
Small boats. Free creators. One great fleet.
小舟から、自由な大船団へ。 / From small boats to a great free fleet.
The peaks left behind as the icebergs melt may not become a wide continent or a high mountain. They may become many small islands. Landing on one of those islands and devoting a lifetime to creating work there is equally important.
Cultural commitments and individual sensibilities may be the last forms of creativity left to humanity.
AICU Award was born at this moment in media history as a community that celebrates those who challenge the world.
We create outstanding work with AI. Those who have faced creative AI themselves can deeply understand and celebrate the challenges, experiments, and failures behind that work.
Let us put aside established industries, technologies, titles, and positions for a moment. We want to create a place where people who use creative AI can meet on equal ground and ask: What kind of work moves the human heart?
Critically, constructively, and respectfully.
By recording outstanding works on a shared timeline and celebrating the people who challenge history, we will build an academy that explores human activity in the Web4 era and makes the future of humanity more fruitful.
Generative AI does not exist only for corporations.
No matter how powerful a technology may be, it becomes part of culture only when people use it, test it, are surprised by it, adapt it, and turn it into creative work.
AICU Award is reaching out to a diverse range of companies and organizations that share this belief.
Companies that want to support creative AI. Companies that have powerful technologies and tools. Companies that develop services together with large communities of users. Media organizations that bring new forms of expression to many readers.
All of them are players who want to connect with skilled and thoughtful users of creative AI and share in the culture those users are creating.
Sponsorship is not simply a relationship in which a company supports creators from outside the award. It is a point of connection where the people who build technologies, use tools, distribute works, and experience those works can meet and understand one another's work and challenges.
We welcome many forms of participation: funding, creative tools, APIs and computing resources, equipment, venues for presentations, exhibitions and screenings, translation, education, and communication.
Powerful tools meet thoughtful users. Those users create new works, and those works help shape the next generation of technology and culture. Building this cycle is what partnership means at AICU Award.
At the same time, sponsorship will never purchase an evaluation. We will disclose sponsorship relationships, distinguish the main awards from partner awards, and protect the independence and fairness of the judging process.
We welcome companies, organizations, educational and research institutions, and communities that will build the history of generative AI creativity together with its users.
Votes and comments are not consumption. They are contributions to the work and to the person who created it.
We will count and describe them accordingly. Every contributor has a name, and every contribution will be made visible.
One comment that encourages an artist is worth as much to this award as one submission. We will not reduce people who spend their time viewing and responding to works to an "audience count."
We accept comments in every language, not only the seven languages into which this site is translated.
No one should have to write in English simply to support someone's work.
Emojis are first-class citizens. They are among the fastest and most honest reactions people have, and they cross every language barrier. We will not hide them in the interface. We will make them easy to use.
Machine translation makes mistakes. And when it does, what is misrepresented is someone's work.
Every automatically translated text will include a way to report a problem. Creators will be able to take control of the translation of their work at any time. Once the creator edits it, the machine-translation label will be removed, and the translation will become theirs.
When a work is published on X, YouTube, or another platform, we will retrieve and display its publicly available view and engagement numbers.
These numbers are not votes and will never become votes.
A work with one million views and a work with 200 views will stand together in the same category under the same conditions. The numbers provide context only: a record of what the work has already done in the world.
Outstanding works will be archived with a Certificate at cert.aicu.ai.
What was submitted, who created it, what permissions were granted, what it received, and when it received it. The Certificate will be linkable, independently verifiable, and able to remain alive longer than the site on which the work was first published.
An award should not end when a creator's name is announced at a ceremony.
The Certificate preserves what the creator made and how it was recognized as a verifiable record on the internet. Creators can use it in their portfolios and profiles and connect that achievement to new commissions, employment, collaborations, exhibitions, screenings, and licensing opportunities.
Each work page will provide a clear way to contact the creator and a clear statement of what may be done and under what conditions—first in ordinary language, and then as a license.
The rights remain with the creator. Receiving an award does not transfer copyright to AICU Award or to any of its partners.
But that is only the beginning. We will make it easier for creators to say, "Yes, you may." We will make their achievements verifiable, help those achievements lead to future work, and create ways for creators to earn legitimate income through screenings, reuse, licensing, pay-per-view access, and generative use of their works.
Under AICU's (GC) Generative Commercial and Creator-Royalty License, copyright itself is not sold. Instead, revenue is returned to the original rights holder whenever a certified work or character is used for generation. The provenance of each use—who generated it, when, from what source, and how much was returned—is recorded and made verifiable.
An example of an award Certificate can be viewed at C2606-1.
An award that no one can verify is not an award. An award that does not lead to a creator's future is not the award we intend to build.
Turn recognition into a record. Turn that record into trust. Turn that trust into future work and income.
This is what makes the award real.
The true outcome of a film festival is not only its award ceremony. It is the one hundred small screenings that follow.
We will provide screening packages, recorded permissions for each work, and a system that tells creators: "Your work was screened here, for this many people."
We will develop a pay-per-view archive following the award ceremony. Its accounting will be managed separately from the event itself.
The purpose is not revenue alone. The purpose is to ensure that works continue to be watched after the night on which they are presented, and that the value created by watching continues to reach the people who created them.
This initiative is still in its first year.
For our inaugural year, the evaluation will draw on community judges participating as individual supporters and on votes cast by the community itself—in other words, the wisdom of crowds.
Sponsorship will never purchase an award result. We will make the roles of community judges and public voting, the methods of aggregation, and the evaluation criteria clear, protecting the independence and fairness of the award.
Beginning next year, we will invite creators—and especially those who have received awards here—to contribute to the judging and critique of the next generation of works.
People who understand what it means to create will discover new works, recognize the challenges behind them, respond with thoughtful words, and celebrate their achievements. Those who receive an award will return to welcome and support the next group of challengers.
This model has much in common with academic societies and international conferences, where researchers evaluate one another's work, exchange criticism, and collectively develop new knowledge.
The works will not be selected from the outside by a temporary panel that disappears when the event ends. Creators will participate in evaluation. Those who have been evaluated will support the next evaluation. Their experience and criticism will accumulate within the community.
We will develop this mutual system into something worthy of being called an academy.
Outstanding creators from different cultures, technologies, and sensibilities will bring together their finest content, expressions, experiments, and challenges. They will share them, critique them, and celebrate one another.
We will build an academy where people who create with AI discover, cultivate, and write into history the work of others who create with AI.
We ask this year's award recipients to lend their knowledge and experience to next year's judging and critique.
Receiving an award is not the end. It is the beginning of taking a place among those who support the next work and the next creator.
Everything marked "IN PROGRESS" or "TO BE BUILT" above has not yet been completed.
But we write it on the web precisely so that it gets done.
Rather than waiting until something is finished before announcing it, it is better to show that we are Building, and to make something large together.
With everyone who shares our Code of Conduct, and everyone who finds this blueprint interesting — the people who make, the people who want to watch, and the people who want to sell — this is what we have decided to make real, so that all three sides are better off: sanpo-yoshi.
for creating people who create, Web4Good, AI4Good.
International AI Creator Award — Founder
Akihiko SHIRAI, Ph.D.