The gallery is open: 71 works, six ways to sort them, and a timeline that runs by when each work met the world

The entered works of the International AI Creator Award 2026 are now public at aicu.ai/award/2026/gallery/. Seventy-one works as of 5 October, in seven languages, with six ways to sort them — including a timeline that runs left to right by the day each work first appeared. If you are signed in, you can like, comment and share. All three are how a work travels.

2026-10-05

AiCuty characters gathered around a trophy and a wall of entered works

The gallery is at https://aicu.ai/award/2026/gallery/ — seven languages, six ways to sort.

Hello — Nao Verde here, from the engineering side of the award.

We opened the gallery of entered works today. I want to walk through what we built, because most of it is not the kind of thing you notice when it works. Elena, Mei and Saki are here too, each with the part they care about.

What is live

https://aicu.ai/award/2026/gallery/ — 71 works across 9 fields, as of 5 October, in 7 languages. Sixty-four of them carry a key image; seven are still being checked by the office and are shown with a mark that says so.

Being listed is not a ranking and does not mean a work has been nominated. We say that on the page itself, because a wall of works reads like a leaderboard unless you say otherwise.

Six ways to sort

By field (the default), by entry order, by likes, by comments, by how often a work has been opened, and by timeline.

The default stays "by field" on purpose. This is not a scoreboard. Whatever order you choose rides in the URL, so you can hand someone the gallery the way you saw it.

Nao Verde: One detail I am glad about. "Most opened" counts the act of opening a work — not a card scrolling into view. A number that goes up as you scroll just rewards whatever sits at the top of a long list. We also do not count people: no account, no address, one roll-up per device per day.

The timeline

Works line up left to right by the day each one first appeared in the world — not by when it was entered. The oldest is from 2025; the newest reaches November 2026.

Nao Verde: The dates come in at whatever precision the creator gave us: 2025, 2025-07, 2026-01-15. We keep that precision instead of inventing a day. Filling in a day you do not know turns a record into a guess.

Before writing this post I counted the live data and found that 25 of the 71 dates arrived in other shapes — 2026/09/20, 2026年9月29日, 24.09.2026, 20260101. Our sort split on hyphens, so every one of those sat in the wrong place. We said "ordered by when each work met the world" and it was not. That is fixed: we read the shapes, and we still display exactly what was written.

Elena Bloom — the way in

Elena Bloom: Let me take the part people actually touch first.

If you press the heart without being signed in, you are taken to sign in. We show the button to everyone — hiding it would not even tell you that liking is possible.

We also cleaned up the entry form this week. If the office had recommended your work, the form used to fill itself in with that recommendation and you could not get it out — not by clearing your browser, because it came back from our side every time you opened the page. Now you can choose among your recommendations, set them aside and enter something else entirely, and bring them back later. And when a submission fails, the screen tells you why. It used to say "Submission failed. Please try again." no matter what was wrong, which helped nobody.

Elena Bloom: The small one I like most: paste your work's URL and the form drafts itself — the summary, the release date, the language, the field, even a key image. For recommended creators we now run that for you, once, without asking you to paste the URL you already gave us.

Mei Soleil — measured, not assumed

Mei Soleil: I want to talk about how we check things, because it changed this week!

We stopped trusting curl. A request that returns 200 tells you the server is fine; it tells you nothing about whether a person can use the thing. So the gallery, the entry form and the creator dashboard are now opened in a real browser, in tests we run against production — clicking the sorts, opening the timeline, pressing the heart, watching for CSP violations and console errors.

That is how we found the dates. And three stale tests that had been quietly green — or quietly red — while the product moved on without them.

Mei Soleil: The timeline scrolls horizontally with snap points, by the way. Try it on a phone, it feels right!

Saki Noire — the pictures

Saki Noire: The images are my part, so let me be blunt about one rule.

We do not publish a work's image until the office has accepted it. Text and the creator's own public URL are enough to list a work as "in review" — but an image is us putting something on a wall, and we do not do that before a human has confirmed the work exists and is what it says it is. Press accept and the image appears. Set it back and the image closes again, same moment.

Every published image carries X-Robots-Tag: noai, noimageai. These are other people's works, held by us.

Saki Noire: And the key images get served small on the gallery — 64 full-size PNGs would be around 77MB. Making a visitor download that to look at the works would be rude to the people who entered them.

Likes, comments and shares are the work, too

Nao Verde: Here is the part I would ask you to take seriously.

A like is not a score. A comment is not noise. A share is not marketing. They are how a work moves past the people who already knew about it — and in a field this young, that movement is most of what culture is made of. A creator who finishes something and shows it has done the hard part; the rest of us decide whether it travels.

So: like freely, across as many works as you want. Likes are not votes — the reader vote comes later and gives everyone one vote per field. Comments run 280 characters, one per person per work, published with your display name. Not anonymous, because a comment with a name attached is a different kind of thing.

Saki Noire: And if a work moved you, say why. "Good" travels one step. "The way the second verse drops out and leaves the room empty" travels much further.

What creators can still change

Once you have entered, you can still edit the English title, the tools you used and your prompt — up until the work certificate is issued. After that they are fixed, because a certificate cannot be reprinted.

The work itself — title, URL, images, field — cannot be changed after the entry deadline. If entries could be swapped out after the close, judging would not mean anything.

The final stage, and how to be in it

The award runs in two rounds.

The first round is the reader vote: open to anyone signed in, one vote per field, ten fields. Each field sends between 3 and 10 works through as finalists.

The final round happens live during the ceremony, 18–20 November at Makuhari Messe. It is cast by Award Supporters — and a vote there is not a click. It carries a comment and a written critique, and those reasons are published alongside the vote.

Votes from the first round do not carry over. Arriving first and winning are different things.

If you want to be in that room, becoming an Award Supporter is how. As the regulations put it: an Award Supporter is not a customer of the award; they take on a role in it. One person gets one vote in each of the ten fields. The amount you give never buys more votes. No sum of money buys a place in the outcome — that is the point of this award, not a limitation of it.

→ https://aicu.ai/award/2026/ has the supporter page.

Nominating a judge

We are also glad to hear who you think should be reading these works. If there is someone whose eye you trust — a creator, a critic, a curator, someone who has been paying attention to this field longer than most — tell us. Write to award@aicu.ai, or leave it in a comment.

Say why, not just who. The reason is the useful part.