The winning entry in Nikon’s prestigious Small World in Motion scientific photography competition is being re-evaluated following criticism from scientists who questioned whether artificial intelligence was used to create the footage.
The annual competition, which has been running for 15 years, showcases photographs and videos captured using powerful microscopes.
The winning entry was a short video submitted by Dr Ning Xu, a researcher at Tsinghua University in China. It purportedly shows tiny, hair-like structures known as cilia moving inside the airways of a child with a rare disease.
Xu has denied breaching the competition’s rules, although he did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.
In a response to a post by Nikon on LinkedIn, Xu acknowledged that AI was used during the image-processing stage but said it was not used to generate the experimental footage, the cilia or their movement.
He said AI was used to “distinguish and visualize features” in reconstructed grayscale images.
The video also uses artificial colour, a common practice in microscopy that is permitted under the competition rules. Such colouring can also be achieved manually using stains and dyes applied to samples.
