Gator Create

AI² Gator Create Competition

Knowledge is most impactful when Applied.

Registration closes October 15th, 2026

Introduction 

The AI² Gator Create Competition is open to all University of Florida (UF) students, inviting them to explore their creative potential with human-centred AI across various aspects of Arts, Applied Design, and Humanities disciplines. Submissions should include artistic expressions, designs, and tools for the categories listed below. The disciplines and categories mentioned are examples to represent the broad range of possibilities. They are not meant to be all-encompassing or limiting. In broad strokes, the competition invites us to conceptualise, create, share, construct new realities, transform existing ones, and demonstrate or illustrate with works ranging from tools, thought experiments, and techniques to applications, entertainments, and artworks. 

Focus & Perspective

To advance creative agency and foster constructive understanding, all submissions must incorporate AI in one of the following ways: 

1. AI is a key subject, concept, or theme within the project. 
2. AI is a core medium for implementing the project. 
3. AI is a vital technology or strategy applied to the project.
4. AI is a hinge tool or technique serving a greater goal in the project. 

The essence of our work transcends AI as a mere concept, method, technology or tool; it is about affirming our humanity as we creatively engage with AI. We encourage using AI as a leverage point rather than a crutch. If your work uses a medium other than AI, a solid understanding of AI's relevant aspects is expected.

Guidelines

When thinking about your project and its goals, you may want to consider the following approaches to help you understand your motivations, contributions or potential benefits:

• People - Culture - Who is it intended for? 
• Processes - Governance - How does it function
• Platforms - Infrastructure & Tools - What are the requirements? 
• Place - Context, Location & Siting - Where is it situated?

Humane AI

We only insist that submitted works are, at their core, humane AI being used as a tool by humans in the service of humanity. Please attend an orientation overview or reach out to us if you have questions. 

Evaluation Criteria

The competition evaluates submissions based on primary criteria, including:

• Creativity - meaning utilising imagination, problem solving, design thinking, skills and energy to transform data, materials, systems, or lived experiences.
• Innovation - meaning to bring new ideas into existence through critical thinking, relevant understandings, generous applications, and distinctive concepts.
• Results - meaning stability in action or presentation, viability, utility, engagement, and quality of production.
• Strategies - meaning processes, including methods of inquiry, experimentation, and research, literature reviews, influences and attributions.
• Impacts - meaning vision, serving present needs, affects and opportunities, future possibilities, and positive indirect or unforeseen effects. 

Common Goals 

AI, like the arts and humanities, intersects with or encompasses all subjects. In academia, we are driven not by fear, purely self-serving motives, or protective territorialism. We are driven to extend understanding, share knowledge, enable potential and foster lifelong curiosity. 

We invite you to create with AI and learn about the diverse voices, competing visions, and evolving ideas surrounding its use. The more we learn, the more empowered we become to utilise and innovate with AI. Engaging and learning about AI allows you to proactively shape and contribute to how it is used in our communities and societies.

Ways of Working

We strongly encourage cooperative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary projects, as the most impactful leaders in any field are those who bridge multiple areas of expertise. Additionally, program-independent and solo projects are also welcome, recognising that creativity can originate from various sources and approaches. Our goal is to promote engagement with and the development of Ethical AI as both a tool and a framework for study, aimed at enhancing human potential and providing sustainable solutions to real-world challenges.

Principles of Ethical AI Innovation 

A successful innovation should have at its heart some contribution to the common good of a community, the world, humanity or other living entities. AI Ethics will be a core part of this competition. Principles and guidelines focused on ways to enable access and embed fairness, data privacy, agency, community accountability, and human oversight to ensure artificial intelligence is developed for public benefit and used responsibly. Ten examples of some factors to consider are:

• Accountability: Maintaining human responsibility and oversight for all automated actions, including reporting or auditing, with user, organisation, or community control.
• Agency: Issues of active participation vs passive consumption are of real importance in AI on the levels of tools, training and data. Choice and clarity on stakeholders, ownership, costs, profits, risks and beneficiaries matters.
• Dignity: That tools, techniques and technologies add to or subtract from the individual and shared affirmation of meaning, purpose, autonomy, connection and justice, long predate AI. Seeking solutions to the challenges of preserving human dignity matters.
• Environment: Large AI training models consume massive amounts of energy, water and other resources. Resource use minimisation and shared benefits maximisation matter.
• Fairness: Eliminating biases arising from flaws or neglect in data collection, design, training incentives, alignment, or from actions that unfairly affect specific groups or perspectives. For example, adverse impacts in hiring, healthcare, justice, representation, or financing. So, the relationships between data inputs and outputs matter. 
• Misinformation: Generative tools lower the barrier to creating convincing, unverified content at scale. Building on ground truths and enabling critical thinking matters.
• Openness: Open Source, open models, and open weights AI - on the UF-approved use list - is encouraged. This supports innovation, creativity, security, and efficiency in rapid prototyping, as well as flexible customisation, and cultivates cross-disciplinary investigation. Plus, local and edge inference computation uses less power and enables more responsive control at a lower cost. 
• Privacy: Protecting personal data, securing sensitive information and providing opportunities for informed consent, and the options to 'opt-in' or 'opt-out'.
• Robustness: That the build quality, operational stability, and options for maintenance and/or upgrades are conscientiously considered is important. If the innovation is a temporary tool or a permanent toy, it is less important than full attention to detail and the quality and sustainability of the overall experience.
• Transparency: Making AI decision-making processes clear and explainable to users, including efforts to avoid the impression of AI as a "black box" or "infallible oracle".

Competition Categories

Students may submit their projects in one of the following categories that best align with their group or individual research outcomes. Keep in mind that projects can fit into more than one category. Therefore, choose a primary category that best represents the main focus of your submission or the way you want it to be assessed from the options below: 

Acting, Performance, & Rhetorical Expression 

Submissions in this category should focus on the creative use of AI in character portrayal, representing or augmenting character in story. Combining elements such as voice, body movement, facial expression, imagination, and shared emotions. This can manifest in various ways, including:

• Non-Verbal Communication: Utilising facial expressions, gestures, tactile signals, visual and sign language, and physical movement or blocking on stage, on screen, or in game/world.
• Physical Expression: Using the face, body, and voice to portray a character effectively. 
• Storytelling & Comedy: This includes solo forms such as traditional and experimental story performance, performance poetry, street and stage magic, and stand-up comedy. 
• Vocal Delivery: Employing vocal projection, clear diction, and emotional inflection to deliver vocal characterisations, oratory and other vocal sounds. 

Architecture & Construction Science

Submissions in this category should focus on the creative application of AI in various aspects of architecture, including spatial design aesthetics, structural engineering principles, digital visualisation, and architectural history and design.

• Building Science: Studying energy efficiency, environmental control, energy and communications systems, and material performance.
• Building Technology: Exploring the practicalities of human-made spaces, materials science, environmental systems, and the structural integrity of buildings. This includes fabrication, traditional tradecraft, systems integration, and design process augmentation.
• Civil Engineering: Focusing on structural design, prediction, evaluation and simulation systems, mechanics, materials, and the physics of infrastructure.
• Computer-Aided Design: Utilising 2D and 3D modelling as well as building information modelling for previsualisation, through construction management, and ongoing maintenance. 
• Construction Management: Covering scheduling, cost estimation, logistics and supply chain optimisation, safety training and monitoring, and best practices in the field.
• Interior Architecture: Emphasising the flow, safety, utility and design aesthetics of indoor spaces.
• Preservation: Restoring and maintaining historical landmarks, buildings and facilities, including both aesthetic, material and structural remediation.
• Sustainable & Green Architecture: Creating eco-friendly and energy-efficient buildings, including biophilic design, landscaping, toxic sites remediation, 'living buildings' and biodiversity land management. 
• Urban Planning: Designing extensive city layouts, public spaces, subsurface utilities and infrastructures, emergency systems, public communications, and transportation networks.

Choreography & Dance Composition

Submissions in this category should concentrate on the innovative use of AI across the various physical, creative, historical, and scientific aspects of dance. The focus areas include, but are not limited to:

• Global & Vernacular Dance Styles: These refer to traditional, folk, social, and street dances that develop naturally within specific cultures and communities.
• Improvisation: This area focuses on generating and exploring spontaneous movement, including movement informed by algorithmic randomness, sensor feedback or audience participation.
• Interdisciplinary Collaborations: This involves combining dance with live music, theatre, fashion, digital media, and other disciplines.
• Restaging & Revival: This involves the innovative staging of existing works or the re-creation of older or underperformed dances by established choreographers, whether new or overlooked.
• Science & Somatic: This covers bone and muscle function, skeletal alignment, and injury prevention, as well as conditioning and dynamic alignment practices. It also looks at physiological responses to training and biomechanics.
• Spatial Design & Documentation: This includes the phrasing, dynamics, and structural elements of dance composition, with subsequent notation, preservation and capture for posterity.  
• Technique & Performance: This encompasses classical, neo-classical, and contemporary dance forms, including floor work, release technique, and current movement practices.

Humanities

Submissions in this category should focus on the creative use of AI in critical and interpretive methods to understand the human experience, culture, history, language (including semiotics and semantics), and philosophy. This includes areas such as literature research, languages, and religion.

• Archiving & Library Sciences: At the core of the Digital Humanities, our ability to access, search, share, analyse, and compare the ever-growing treasure trove of human-made knowledge and machine-generated insight.
• Education & Learning: How the praxis of teaching and learning can be challenged, refined and advanced, including the expansion of pedagogical practice as an art, craft, science and human-centred action. 
• History & Cultural Studies: The study of global human societies' changes over time. Including the theory, analysis, and the mapping of past and predicting future directions in human experience. Intersecting all competition categories of Dance, Visual Arts, Music, Communications, Architecture, Literature, Performance, Documentation and more. 
• Languages and Linguistics: The study of world languages, grammar, translation, preservation, learning, analysis, cognition, and the structure of human speech and transspecies communications.
• Media Studies & Cultural Theory: Metamedia, culture hacking, critique and the documentation, analysis, forecasting of and learning from electronic analogue and digital human media production.
• Museum & Curatorial Studies: The nexus of exhibitions, entertainment, education, research and preservation of the human story in art, artefacts, environments and documents.
• Philosophy: The exploration of fundamental questions regarding existence, knowledge, values, and reason. The focus is primarily on the problems, processes, and products of thinking and action related to AI.
• Religions: The exploration of the subject of belief systems, their origins, sacred texts, and practices across various cultures.

Music

Submissions in this category should focus on the innovative use of AI in music across various aspects such as creation, history, technology, and the therapeutic benefits of sound.

• Composition & Theory: This area covers structural analysis, score reading, notation, orchestration, sampling, and original songwriting.
• Music Technology: Here, the focus is on instrument design and crafting, audio engineering, digital sound design, mixing, and studio recording workflows.
• Musical Performance: This section emphasises instrumental or vocal performance, participation in ensembles, and presentation during recitals.
• Musicology and Ethnomusicology: This examines the historical, social, and cultural contexts of various global musical traditions.
• Music Therapy: This combines psychology and clinical training to utilise music for healing and rehabilitation purposes.

Script & Story

Submissions in this category should emphasise the creative use of AI, focusing on core narratives, interactive fictions, plots, and emotional arcs within patterns of 'story' and persona. Literature is covered here, including but not limited to written works, poetry, narrative fiction, performance literature, and creative writing, as well as aspects that feed into other creative endeavours. Its elements are the following:

• Character: The individuals or personas brought to life by the actors, captured digitally, or expressed in automatons, puppets, humanoids, robots, androids, or avatars.
• Dialogue & Language: The spoken words, gestural and sign language, monologues, improvised exchanges, or generative encounters, or poetic text used to convey the story.
• Plot: The sequence of events, including the beginning, rising action, climax, graphic narrative and comics, anti-narrative, dramaturgical development, interactive and dynamic story, game mechanics, and resolution.
• Theme: The central idea, message, 'text', relative context, and subtext, or deeper meaning of creative or representational works.

Theatre Design & Production

Submissions in this category should focus on the creative use of AI across various aspects of live performances with a thematically coherent improvisation or a written script brought to life on stage. This includes the design, construction, and planning of how a show looks, sounds, and operates. Areas of focus include, but are not limited to:

• Costumes & Makeup: The clothing, accessories, prosthesis and makeup that transform actors into their characters.
• Lighting: The placement, colour, and intensity of lights used to establish mood and direct audience attention, including control systems and image projection.
• Props: Movable objects that actors handle or use on stage, or that are triggered and or viewed by performers, participants, or audience; including masks, puppets, stage magic, and animatronic components.
• Set Design: Scenography, the physical backgrounds, environments and large structures that represent mood, time, space, mental state and location.
• Sound: The music, ambient noises, and sound effects that enhance the environment.

Visual Arts

Submissions in this category should emphasise the creative use of AI in both material and conceptual practices. This includes, but is not limited to: 

• Art Therapy: The combination of psychology and studio methods to aid in healing through creative expression.
• Cinema: 'Live action', visual and sonic creative narrative fictions, and meta-fictions, in motion pictures for shared audience viewing or streaming.
• Conceptual Art: Works that prioritise internal, intellectual concepts, often valuing these as highly as or more than traditional aesthetic, technical, and material considerations.
• Digital Media: Creations involving digital still and moving images, as well as 2D/3D models, interactive and immersive pieces, and web-based works and XR (extended realities).
• Narrative & 'Experimental' Animation: Works of dynamic visual motion of non-live action, rendered to convey story, character, meaning, or mood. 
• Social Practice: Art that utilises human interaction, social discourse, and community collaboration as its primary materials.
• Sound Art: A practice in which audio serves as the main medium, shaping physical space, altering sensory perception, and challenging traditional boundaries of the art gallery.
• Studio Practice: Works grounded in traditional forms of art such as drawing, photography, graphic narratives and comics/manga, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and installation.

Media & Visual Communications

Submissions in this category should emphasise the creative application of AI in visuals, design, and technology for conveying ideas and information. Areas of focus include, but are not limited to, graphic design, user experience (UX/UI) design, digital media, and photography.

• Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) &  Special Visual Effects (SFX): Integrated special effects through synthetic imaging and compositing for cinema, television, and location-based entertainment.
• Digital Worlds & Game Design: Producing generative and fixed open worlds, interactive environments, sensor-sensitive real-world installations, and games that are purely digital or augmented by digital experiences. 
• Graphic Design: Creating logos, brand systems, and layout designs for both print and digital formats.
• Illustration: Producing digital or physical artwork to communicate stories and data effectively.
• Motion Graphics & Animation: Incorporating movement into visuals and dynamic text for use in videos, instructional design, and social media. 
• Photography & Photojournalism: Capturing commercial content, or news images and actuality, non-fiction editorial, and documented events conveying factual information.
• UI/UX Design: Designing websites and mobile applications to ensure they are user-friendly, stable, efficient and enjoyable.
• Video Production: Shooting and editing footage to create clear and engaging fiction or non-fiction stories, including live and staged production
• VR, AR, MR and XR: Virtual, Augmented, Mixed and Extended Realities that incorporate static, dynamic and spatial representations   
• Typography: Exploring how text appears, reads, and integrates within layouts.

Submission Information 

(Please answer the questions below to the best of your ability.) 

1. Name(s) of Principal Researchers:
2. Name(s) of Research Associates: (if none, leave blank)
3. Selected Category: Submission Category (select the category that best describes your submission based on the provided categories).
4. Project Title:  Choose a concise name for your submission that reflects your goals, subjects, results, or even humorous aspects of the project to help others understand what to expect or how to engage.
5. Name of Department, School, and or Program: Your project does not have to align with your major, program, or your current 'field of expertise'.
6. Project Synopsis: Provide a brief description of the project and its goals. 
7. Project Context: Share details of how the project is ideally to be deployed, published, exhibited, distributed, interacted with, used and or maintained.
8. Engagement with the Greater Good: Explain how this research contributes to the greater good and its relevance in that context. 
9. Influence of Existing Works: Identify existing works that inform your innovation and describe how they do so. Literature reviews or attributions apply here. These do not only have to be AI-based works.
10. Resourcefulness: Share how you used creativity and available tools to solve problems, overcome challenges, and achieve goals, highlighting your resilient mindset and focus on making the best of your project.
11. Accessibility & Pluralism: Please share speculations, designs, and insights on the potential, or if not why, of enabling technologies or other opportunities for expanded use.
12. Expansion & Connection: In what ways do you think this work might be expanded by those in other disciplines or connected with other professionals, communities, users, or audiences beyond your original intention?
13. Improvements with Unlimited Resources: If budget, time, and resources were not constraints, how could this work be enhanced?