Nikon Re-Reviews Prize-Winning Microscope Video After AI Content Allegations

Japanese optics company Nikon has said it is 'carefully re-reviewing' the contest submission by Ning Xu, an optical engineer at the National University of Singapore, after commenters accused him of using AI-generated content in his winning video for the 16th annual Small World in Motion competition.

Nikon announced Xu's winning entry in mid-September and later shared it on LinkedIn, where it drew criticism. The video showed movement of cilia in lung tissue samples from a child with primary ciliary dyskinesia, but viewers pointed to unidentified red, blue and purple structures beneath the cilia. Edward Phelps, a bioengineering researcher at the University of Florida, said the purple structures resembled mitochondria but such an arrangement does not occur in biology, and that the blue nodules looked like nuclei but did not behave like them. Ian Donovan, a PhD student at UT Southwestern Medical Center, noted the video carried a SynthID watermark, a tool pioneered by Google DeepMind and now used by a number of AI companies.

In LinkedIn updates, Nikon said Xu was cooperating and had provided detailed technical documentation about the microscopy equipment, imaging methods and processing techniques used. The company also clarified in a blog post that an 'unsupervised neural-network method' was used in post-processing to distinguish and visualize features in grayscale data.

Xu maintained that the original video of the cilia and its motion is real, and that AI was used only on reconstructed grayscale data to distinguish and color structures with similar morphology, without making anatomical claims. Critics and fellow participants have noted that the contest rules forbid using generative AI to produce entries. Scientists have also stressed the importance of preserving trust in scientific images, with some comparing the result to old photos restored by AI.