Nikon strips AI contest winner after scientific scrutiny

Dr. Ning Xu from Tsinghua University in China initially won the Nikon Small World in Motion contest with a video depicting cilia beating in the airways of a child. The victory was later revoked after Nikon investigated the entry and determined that Xu violated the competition's rules. As a result, he was stripped of his prize.

Scientists raised concerns about the entry after observing abnormalities in cell structure and size that appeared to disappear and reappear unnaturally. An associate professor at the University of Florida noted that structures in the video pop in and out of existence, while cilia appear from nowhere, indicating AI generation. PhD student Ian Donovan at UT Southwestern Medical Center found a distinctive watermark in the source image suggesting it was AI-generated. Two former competition judges also raised concerns about the legitimacy of the video entry.

Xu admitted in a deleted LinkedIn post that he used AI to distinguish and visualize features in reconstructed grayscale images during post-processing. He insisted that AI was not used to generate the video itself, the cilia, or their movement, and claimed he did not break competition rules. Scientists argued that doubts about the entry could have been resolved if Xu had shared the RAW grayscale video.

The top spot in the contest was awarded to Nguyen Nam Nhat of Vietnam for a video of a tiny roundworm and a single-celled organism. Nikon stated in a statement that it plans to revisit rules and evaluation procedures for future competition entries following the incident.