- BONAVENTURE, N.Y., Dec. 17, 2025 — 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. His 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.