The winning entry in a prestigious scientific imaging competition is being reviewed after other researchers raised doubts that it was created with AI.
Nikon’s annual Small World In Motion contest accepts photographs and videos captured using high-powered microscopes. The competition has been held every year for 15 years.
The winning entry this year was a short video submitted by Dr Ning Xu, a researcher at Tsinghua University in China. It is described as showing tiny, hair-like structures called cilia moving inside the airways of a child with a rare disease.
Dr Xu did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment, but he has posted online to deny breaking the contest’s rules.
In a response to a Nikon post on LinkedIn, he did not dispute that AI was used in the image-processing workflow, but he said the submission remained within the competition’s rules.
“AI was not used to generate the experimental movie, the cilia, or their motion,” he said.
The video is artificially brightly coloured, a technique that is common in microscopy and permitted in the contest. Such colouring is usually added manually by applying stains or dyes to the sample itself.
Dr Xu acknowledged that AI was used “to distinguish and visualize features in the reconstructed grayscale images.”
However, other scientists raised concerns that the video contained shapes and movements inconsistent with normal cell structures or behaviour, and that the cilia appeared too large.
Edward Phelps, an associate professor at Florida University, commented on Nikon’s social media post, noting that some structures seemed to “pop in and out of existence” and that the cilia “appear from nowhere.”
Meanwhile, Ian Donovan, a PhD student at UT Southwestern Medical Centre, said the source image appeared to contain a distinctive watermark indicating that it had been AI generated.
Two former competition judges also said they had concerns about whether the image was authentic.
