Official Statement: A Needed Clarification on AI Submissions at the Short of the Year Awards 2025

To our community of filmmakers, fans, and industry friends,

As we prepare to close the final chapter of the Short of the Year Awards for this season, we are at a key intersection between legacy and technology. Later today, we will announce the festival winners. However, before the announcement, we owe our community an honest conversation.

This year, the inclusion of AI short films in the Audience Choice Awards has ignited considerable discussion. We want to be completely transparent about how this happened and where we stand.

How We Got Here: There was no calculated decision to introduce an “AI Category” or to pit AI against human creators. When the submission window opened, we accepted AI-generated entries through our standard process, as we lacked a specific policy for this emerging technology.

It is essential to clarify that the Audience Choice Award—where the voting took place—was the only category open to direct submissions. The core of the Short of the Year Awards is dedicated to honoring excellence in specific cinematic disciplines through juried categories that exclusively consider traditional films reviewed on Indie Shorts Mag throughout the year. These categories include:

• Best Short Film (Short of the Year)
• Best Documentary
• Best Direction
• Best Cinematography
• Best Editing
• Best Music
• Best Screenplay

You can learn more about the full scope of the festival in our official announcement post here.

To provide context on the scale of the inclusion in the popular vote, we received 114 submissions for the Audience Choice Awards. After review, 62 films were approved: 50 traditional films, 3 documentaries, and 9 AI-generated films.

Our curation remained strict across all media. We rejected 27 AI short films—a rejection rate significantly higher than in other categories. Yet, while AI short films were a minority, we failed to consider the difficulties of placing them in direct competition with traditional live-action and animated films.

We hear you, and we take full responsibility for the friction this misjudgment caused.

A Learning Curve

Our mission is to champion independent cinema. However, treating AI submissions as “business as usual” created a confusing playing field.

We realize now that filmmaking and AI-generated works, while both capable of telling stories, require different skill sets and evaluation criteria.

Mixing them was a disservice to both communities. It failed to acknowledge the clear physical and technical craft required for traditional filmmaking, while also subjecting AI creators to criteria ill-suited for their medium. AI filmmakers deserve a space where their innovation is appreciated on its own terms, free from backlash.

Many of you have suggested that AI films should have their own distinct category or exist on an entirely separate platform. We agree. As an immediate action, we have updated our platform to label and segregate Short Films, AI Short Films, and Documentaries to avoid confusion among our audience. We are still learning, and we are taking these inputs very seriously—from our industry friends, our fans, and the filmmakers who have reached out to us.

Addressing the Absence of Communication

We also want to address why we did not issue this statement sooner.

As our community’s discussion grew, our instinct was to address it immediately. However, the voting lines were already open. We made the difficult decision to withhold an official administrative statement until the voting process concluded. We did not want to influence the audience’s choice or hamper the integrity of the voting mechanism while it was live.

Now that the voting has officially closed, we can speak freely.

The Future

In the future, we are committed to restructuring how we approach these technologies. We recognize the passion and effort that go into every submission, regardless of the tools used. In the coming years, we will ensure that any AI work included is handled in a way that respects traditional filmmaking while also providing proper context for AI art. We will finalize and announce our 2026 submission guidelines well in advance of the following submission cycle, before November 2026.

We should have handled this situation better. We are listening, we are learning, and we are committed to improving our process for the artists we exist to serve.

The winners of the Short of the Year Awards will be announced later today. This year’s winners—regardless of their medium—earned their recognition through the audience’s genuine appreciation. We hope you will join us in recognizing the outstanding talent that has surfaced this year.

Sincerely,
Indie Shorts Mag Team