Nikon has stripped the top prize from Dr. Ning Xu, a researcher at Tsinghua University in China, after an investigation found his entry in the company's Small World in Motion contest broke the competition's rules. The winning video was determined to have been created using artificial intelligence.

The contest, now in its 16th year, accepts movie or digital time-lapse photography taken through a microscope. Xu's video showed tiny cilia beating in the airways of a child with primary ciliary dyskinesia, a rare respiratory disorder. Almost from the start, it drew skepticism. Some researchers said the cells appeared abnormal in structure and size, and that their features came and went in a way they had never seen in cellular biology.

An associate professor at the University of Florida said some of the structures “pop in and out of existence” and that the cilia “appear from nowhere.” Those are classic signs that a video was AI-generated, he said.

The most direct evidence came from Ian Donovan, a PhD student at UT Southwestern Medical Center. Donovan said the source image appeared to contain a distinctive watermark indicating it had been generated by AI. Two former competition judges also raised questions about the clip's legitimacy.

Xu later addressed the criticism in a LinkedIn post, which he has since deleted. In it, he admitted to using AI but said it was applied only during post-processing, to “distinguish and visualize features in the reconstructed grayscale images from the super-resolution optical imaging.” He said AI was not used to generate the video, the cilia or their movement.

Xu maintains that he did not break any rules. Enhancing the visibility of microscopic structures is common and permitted in the field, though researchers typically do it by applying stains and dyes to the samples themselves. His explanation, however, does not account for the abnormalities critics pointed to. Some scientists said the doubts could have been cleared up if Xu had shared the RAW grayscale video.

Nikon's investigation concluded that Xu had violated the competition's rules, and he lost the prize. The top spot went to Nguyen Nam Nhat of Vietnam, whose entry showed a tiny roundworm and a single-celled organism. Following the decision, Nikon said it plans to “revisit rules and evaluation procedures for future competition entries.”

The episode is not the first time AI-generated work has won a competition meant for human creators. A Midjourney image took a category in the Colorado State Fair's annual art competition in 2022, and another AI creation won a photography contest hosted by Australian photo retailer digiDirect in 2023. That same year, an artist who won a category in the Sony World Photography Awards turned down his prize because his image was AI-generated.

Not every case ended with an apology. In 2024, a man who won a digital art competition with an AI-generated image said he was unapologetic about it. He complained that people had started stealing his “work” and that he could not copyright it.

Este artículo fue escrito con la asistencia de IA.
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