Last month we reported on the winner of Nikon’s Small World in Motion video: Ning Xu of Tsinghua University in China, whose video showed tiny cilia in the airways of a child with a rare respiratory disease. However, allegations surfaced that Xu used AI to create the video. Nikon launched an investigation and concluded that Xu’s entry did not comply with the contest rules. The new winner is Nguyen Nam Nhat from Vietnam with a video of a tiny roundworm and a single-celled organism (above).
According to a BBC report, some researchers expressed concern that Xu’s video showed structural anomalies and that cell features appeared and disappeared in ways that would not be seen in actual cell biology. Others discovered what looked like AI watermarks embedded in the source files. Xu said he used AI “to distinguish and visualize features in the reconstructed grayscale images”; However, he denied that AI was used “to create the experimental film, the eyelashes or their movement.”
Launched in 2011, the Nikon Small World in Motion competition is a spin-off of the company’s Small World Photomicrography Competition, which has existed since 1974. Both are intended to “show the beauty and complexity of things seen through the light microscope” – one through still images, the other through photovideography, taking advantage of all the technological advances that now allow users to create films or time-lapse images through the microscope.
The other winners also improved with Xu’s disqualification. Benedikt Pleyer of Bavaria, Germany, took second place with a video of jellyfish larvae floating in water droplets; Andrew Moore from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the US took third place with a video of synchronized cell division in neighboring cells; Patrick Hickey from Hypha Research Ltd. in Edinburgh, Scotland, took fourth place with a video on the dynamics of mitochondria and chloroplasts in turtle vine leaf cells; and Igor Adameyko took fifth place with a video of a tiny, colorful sea snail (Cyerce kikutarobabai) on the way.
