Organizers of Nikon’s Small World in Motion photomicrography competition have rejected this year’s winning entry after determining it violated rules against generative AI.
“After carefully re-evaluating the video and materials and consulting with our jury members, Nikon determined that the winning video did not comply with the competition rules regarding generative AI,” Remi Yuter, a competition spokesperson, told Gizmodo via email.
Controversy erupted in recent weeks after experts noticed that optical engineer Ning Xu of the National University of Singapore’s winning entry, a video of cilia in airway tissue samples taken from a child with primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD), was full of structures that did not appear to exist in biology. There was also a SynthID watermark identifying the AI.
Xu clarified that the video was from actual research footage, but that he used generative AI for “post-processing.” Whatever the intention, the red, blue, and purple structures seen in the clip appear to have been altered beyond recognition or entirely fabricated.
“I’ve been diagnosing PCD for 20 years by looking at the waveform of the cilia, the length, size and shape of the cells,” Robert Hirst, a scientist at the University of Leicester, told the BBC. Everything shown in the video “doesn’t look anything like those of PCD patients,” Hirst said, adding that the incident has had a negative impact on PCD patients, doctors and support networks around the world.
“Nikon has adjusted the competition rankings to reflect this decision,” Yuter wrote, emphasizing that the decision was based entirely on eligibility rules and “should not be construed as a judgment on the entrant’s professional reputation, scientific contributions, or intent.”
The new winner is Nguyen Nam Nhat from Vietnam, who submitted a video of a roundworm and a single-celled organism called Dileptus. Xu’s entry no longer appears on the competition winners page. Yuter added in the statement that Nikon Small World “will review the rules and judging procedures for future competition entries.”
A widely cited set of scientific guidelines, predating generative AI, says scientists should disclose when they colorize images. Generative AI is a difference in nature, not degree, because it makes pixels.
Making pixels isn’t really science. Melanie White, a developmental biologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, previously told Nature that scientific images are data and that scientists “need to be able to be confident that what we’re seeing is based on the underlying measurement.”
Xu did not respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo, but we will update if we hear back.
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