Last month, we covered the winner of Nikon’s Small World in Motion video: Ning Xu of Tsinghua University in China, whose video captured tiny eyelashes fluttering in the airways of a child with a rare respiratory disorder. But allegations have surfaced regarding Xu’s use of AI while making the video. Nikon opened an investigation and concluded that Xu’s application did not comply with competition rules. The new winner is Nguyen Nam Nhat from Vietnam with a video of a small roundworm and a single-celled organism (above).
According to a BBC report, some researchers expressed concern that Xu’s video showed structural abnormalities and that cellular features appeared and disappeared in ways that would not be seen in real cell biology. Others spotted what looked like AI watermarks embedded in the source files. Xu said he used AI “to distinguish and visualize the features of reconstructed grayscale images”; however, he denied that AI was used “to generate the experimental film, the eyelashes or their movement.”
Founded in 2011, the Nikon Small World in Motion competition is a spinoff of the company’s Small World Photomicrography competition, which has been running since 1974. Both aim to “highlight the beauty and complexity of things seen through a light microscope,” one through still photographs, the other through photovideography, taking advantage of all the technological advances that now allow users to make films or time-lapse images under a microscope.
The other winners also moved up a notch with Xu’s disqualification. Benedikt Pleyer from Bavaria, Germany, placed second with a video of jellyfish larvae suspended in water droplets; Andrew Moore of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the United States placed third with a video of synchronized cell division in neighboring cells; Patrick Hickey of Hypha Research Ltd. in Edinburgh, Scotland, placed fourth with a video of the dynamics of mitochondria and chloroplasts in Turtle Vine leaf cells; and Igor Adameyko placed fifth with a video of a small, colorful sea slug (Cyerce kikutarobabai) on the move.
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