Tiny image sparks big backlash in Nikon photo contest

The winning video in Nikon’s Small World In Motion competition is under review after scientists questioned whether artificial intelligence was used to create it. Nikon’s yearly Small World In Motion contest accepts photos and video taken with powerful microscopes and has run annually for the past 15 years. The winning entry was a short clip submitted by Dr Ning Xu, a researcher at Tsinghua University in China, which purports to show tiny hair‑like structures called cilia moving within the airways of a child with a rare disease. Xu did not reply to the BBC’s request for comment, but has posted online denying that he broke the contest rules. In a response to a Nikon post on LinkedIn, external, he said he did not use AI in the image processing and maintained that he remained within the rules of the contest. “AI was not utilized to make the experimental movie, the cilia, oregon their motion,” he said. Xu acknowledged that AI was used “to separate and visualize features successful the reconstructed grayscale images”. Critics argue that the video contains shapes and movements that do not match typical cell structures or behaviours, and that the cilia appear excessively large. Commenting on Nikon’s social‑media post, Edward Phelps, associate professor at Florida University, observed that some of the structures “pop successful and retired of existence” and that the cilia “appear from nowhere”. Meanwhile, PhD candidate Ian Donovan from UT Southwestern Medical Centre said the source image appeared to contain a distinctive watermark indicating it had been AI generated. In addition, two former contest judges said they also had concerns about whether the image was real.