Tiny image sparks big backlash in Nikon photo contest

Meanwhile, the winning entry of a prestigious scientific photography competition is being re-evaluated after criticism from other scientists that it was produced with AI.

Key points

• Dr Patrick Hickey, who came fifth in the 2026 Small World contest, remarked the recognition the award represents means more than the $3, 000 (£2, 250) prize itself.
• Nikon's annual Small World In Motion contest accepts photos and video taken using powerful microscopes, and has run annually for the last 15 years.
• Meanwhile PhD student Ian Donovan from UT Southwestern Medical Centre remarked the source image appeared to contain a distinctive watermark indicating it had been AI generated.
• The winner was a short video submitted by Dr Ning Xu, a researcher at Tsinghua University in China.
• Two former competition judges remarked they additionally had reservations concerning whether the image was real.

Notably, the winner was a short video submitted by Dr Ning Xu, a researcher at Tsinghua University in China. It claims to be footage of tiny, hair-like structures called cilia moving inside the airways of a child with a rare disease.

Xu did not respond to the BBC's request for comment, but has posted online denying he broke the competition rules.

In a response to a post by Nikon on LinkedIn, external, he did not dispute using AI within the image processing but remarked he remained within the rules of the contest.

"AI was not used to generate the experimental movie, the cilia, or their motion, " he remarked.

Xu's video is artificially brightly coloured – common in microscopy and permitted in the contest – which is usually done manually using stains and dyes on the sample itself.

He accepted AI was applied "to distinguish and visualize features in the reconstructed grayscale images".

But the challenges created by other scientists include claims that the video contains shapes and movements which did not fit with normal cell structures or behaviours, and that the cilia seemed to be too sizeable.

Commenting on Nikon's social media post, Edward Phelps, associate professor at Florida University, observed some of the structures "pop in and out of existence" and the cilia "appear from nowhere".

Additionally, two former competition judges remarked they additionally had reservations concerning whether the image was real.

Nikon remarked Xu was "respectfully complying" with its investigation and had provided it with further technical documents.

"If you spend a lot of your time in a dark room looking down a microscope, it's really nice to be able to show people and to show the public, " he remarked.

"There's an interesting fusion between science and art, and a lot of the images that scientists are making have some very abstract and artistic qualities to them."

Hickey remarked it would be unfair on other entrants if it turned out the winning video was unfairly altered by AI.

"There's a specific set of rules in the contest, and one of them was quite clearly that you couldn't use generative AI to produce things, and the other was obviously that it has to be taken under a microscope, " he remarked.

So far, Nikon is standing by its procedures but it remarked there would be an update shortly.

"At this time, we don't see that any rules were violated, " it remarked in an official note. What is AI and how does it work? OpenAI unveils AI assistant 'dots' while safety worries delay new model. Chinese AI tool informed researchers how to produce bioweapons.

In short, tiny image sparks big backlash in Nikon photo contest is the central thread here, and readers can expect follow-up reporting as the picture becomes clearer.