Last month we covered the winner of Nikon's Small World in Motion video: Ning Xu of Tsinghua University in China, whose video captured tiny cilia beating in the airways of a child with a rare respiratory disorder. But allegations surfaced about Xu's use of AI while making the video. Nikon launched an investigation and concluded that Xu's entry did not comply with competition rules. The new winner is Nguyen Nam Nhat of 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 had structural abnormalities and that cell features appeared and disappeared in a way one would not see in actual cellular biology. Others spotted what looked like AI watermarks embedded within 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 generate the experimental movie, the cilia, or their motion.”
