St. Bonaventure University senior Tanner Pasi has won the Broadcast Education Association’s inaugural Gen AI Competition, an innovative challenge that tasked students with creating a 30-second video entirely through artificial intelligence tools — all within just 60 minutes.

Pasi, an English major from St. Marys, Pennsylvania, produced his winning entry using Sora 2, OpenAI’s advanced text-to-video generator.

“I was thrilled. I literally started shaking with excitement as I started processing the news,” Pasi said upon learning he had won the national competition.

The BEA challenge, open to colleges and universities across the country, required students to create a fully AI-generated video — including visuals, narration and effects — aligning with a themed prompt released by the organization.

The guidelines students had to use to create their AI prompt was that they had just witnessed the “greatest scene in the history of sports” at a world championship athletics event held in Moscow in 1980 (but not the boycotted 1980 Summer Olympics). They were allowed to interpret what “greatest” meant, from triumphant to heartbreaking.

The students had only one hour to produce the video and didn’t know what the prompt parameters were until the hour started.

Pasi’s video shows a young child watching the event on TV and becoming thrilled — and ultimately inspired — as a pole vaulter smashes the world record. It transitions at the end to the child years later, pole in hand, preparing to vault.

Among the 21 participating schools were Syracuse, Drake, Miami, Arizona State, Florida and Alabama.

Pasi’s entry was submitted through JMC 245: Video Storytelling, taught by Jandoli School of Communication faculty member Scott Sackett, who prepared his classes extensively ahead of the competition, focusing on both the capabilities and limitations of emerging AI tools.

“I had my classes train for several weeks before the competition,” Sackett said. “Students became versed in AI’s shortcomings, and we developed strategies to work around or even leverage them.

“They cleverly used ChatGPT to optimize Sora’s output and applied video-editing techniques to gain control of their narratives. I’m proud of the strategic thinking my students employed and developed this semester to exploit AI.”

Students in Sackett’s two sections of JMC 245 created videos and voted internally to determine which submissions would move forward.

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About the University: The nation’s first Franciscan university, St. Bonaventure is a community committed to transforming the lives of its students inside and outside the classroom, inspiring in them a commitment to academic excellence and lifelong civic engagement. Out of 167 regional universities in the North, St. Bonaventure was ranked #8 for value and #19 overall by U.S. News and World Report (2025).