Tiny image sparks big backlash in Nikon photo contest

Tiny image triggers major backlash in Nikon photo contest

The winning entry in a respected scientific photography competition is now under review after other scientists criticized it as having been made with AI.

Nikon’s yearly Small World In Motion contest features photos and videos captured with powerful microscopes, and it has been held every year for the past 15 years.

The winner was a brief video submitted by Dr Ning Xu, a researcher at Tsinghua University in China, which says it shows tiny, hair-like structures called cilia moving inside the airways of a child with a rare disease.

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

He did not dispute using AI in the image-processing stage, but said he stayed within the contest rules.

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

Xu’s video is artificially brightly coloured - which is common in microscopy and allowed in the contest - and this is usually done manually using stains and dyes on the sample itself.

He acknowledged that AI was used "to distinguish and visualize features in the reconstructed grayscale images".

However, the objections raised by other scientists include claims that the video shows shapes and movements that do not match normal cell structures or behaviour, and that the cilia appeared to be too large.

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

Meanwhile, PhD student Ian Donovan from UT Southwestern Medical Centre said the source image seemed to include a distinctive watermark suggesting it had been AI generated.

In addition, two former competition judges said they also had concerns about whether the image was genuine.

Nikon said Xu was "respectfully complying" with its investigation and had supplied additional technical documents.

Dr Patrick Hickey, who finished fifth in the 2026 Small World contest, said the recognition the award brings means more than the $3,000 (£2,250) prize itself.

"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 said.

"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 said it would be unfair to other entrants if it turned out the winning video had been improperly 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 said.

For now, Nikon is standing by its procedures, but it said an update would be coming soon.

"At this time, we don't see that any rules were violated," it said in a statement.