5,000. That's how many creators have entered Bilibili's AI Creation Contest in its first month.

Bilibili has officially launched the Coin Leaderboard feature for its AI Creation Contest — viewers can award coins to participating AI works, the ranking updates in real-time based on coins, and the top work gets homepage placement and traffic support. After the feature launched, daily active users in the AI creation zone jumped 40%, and many users who previously only lurked started making AI works themselves.

This number is noteworthy. This time last year, AI art and AI video were still niche toys — people who could use Stable Diffusion or run SVD were called "experts." Just one year later, AI creation tool barriers have dropped low enough for mainstream users, and a single contest on Bilibili drawing 5,000 participants shows AI content creation has truly entered the mass-market era.

What Problem Does the Coin Leaderboard Solve?

Why did Bilibili build a dedicated coin leaderboard for an AI contest? Because AI content faces an awkward problem: uneven quality makes it hard for viewers to know what's worth watching.

Lower barriers to AI creation are good, but the side effect is obvious: garbage content grows exponentially. Early AI-generated videos were instantly recognizable — deformed hands, flickering frames, nonsensical logic; now AI generation quality keeps improving, and ordinary viewers can't easily tell which works had real effort put in versus which were assembly-line products from typing a few prompts.

The Coin Leaderboard's essence is using community voting instead of algorithmic recommendations. Bilibili's coins are a heavier action than likes — users have a limited daily coin supply and only award them to works they genuinely love. Ranking by coins is essentially letting the community vote with real (virtual) money for AI works, filtering out genuine quality better than simple view counts or likes.

The Coin Leaderboard has another benefit: it gives creators a positive feedback loop. Previously, posting an AI work on Bilibili might get a few hundred views and a couple of comments, leaving creators unsure if they were doing well; with a leaderboard, seeing their work ranked and awarded coins creates motivation to keep creating. This is critical for nurturing a healthy AI creation community.

AI Reshaping the UGC Ecosystem: Not Replacing Creators — Lowering Barriers

Many worry AI will replace content creators, but Bilibili's contest suggests the opposite: AI doesn't replace creators — it lets more people become creators.

Looking at the 5,000 creators in this contest, many don't identify as "artists," "UP hosts," or "video producers" — they're students, office workers, doctors, teachers, programmers who previously lacked the professional skills to make videos or art, but with AI tools can now turn their ideas into content and publish them. Entries include sci-fi shorts made by high schoolers with AI, medical education animations by doctors, programming tutorials by programmers — content that would never have existed before, because these people didn't have professional production skills.

What's the essence of UGC platforms? It's not a handful of professional creators producing content for the masses — it's everyone being able to produce content for everyone else. From text (Weibo, Zhihu) to images (Xiaohongshu, Instagram) to short video (Douyin, Bilibili), every medium upgrade brings lower creation barriers and explosive growth in content volume. AI is the next medium upgrade — it lowers barriers for video, animation, 3D, and other formats that previously required professional skills to the point where ordinary people can use them.

Of course, questions come with it: who owns the copyright? Who holds rights to AI-generated content? How do we prevent vulgar, violent, or deepfake content? These questions don't have answers yet — they need platforms, regulators, and creators figuring them out together. But the direction is certain: creation will keep getting easier, good content will always be scarce, and creators with genuine originality, taste, and perspective will only become more valuable in the AI age — because anyone can use tools, but taste and creativity can't be taught.

See you tomorrow.