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A prestigious scientific imaging competition run by camera giant Nikon has found itself at the centre of a controversy after the winning entry was accused of being created with the help of artificial intelligence.
The Small World In Motion contest, which has been running for 15 years, invites researchers to submit photographs and videos captured through powerful microscopes. This year's top prize went to Dr Ning Xu, a researcher based at Tsinghua University in China.
His submission was a short video that he described as footage of cilia — tiny, hair-like structures — beating inside the airways of a child suffering from a rare disease. Cilia play a vital role in the human body, sweeping mucus and debris out of the respiratory tract, and capturing them in motion is the kind of technical feat that the competition was designed to celebrate.
However, almost as soon as the result was announced, other scientists began raising doubts about whether the footage was genuine. Their concerns centred on a range of visual anomalies that, in their view, could not be explained by normal cell biology.
Edward Phelps, an associate professor at Florida University, commented on Nikon's social media announcement that some of the structures in the video "pop in and out of existence," while the cilia themselves seemed to "appear from nowhere." Such behaviour, he suggested, is inconsistent with how living cells are expected to behave under a microscope.
Ian Donovan, a PhD student at UT Southwestern Medical Centre, went further. He said the source image appeared to carry a distinctive watermark of the kind typically left behind by AI image-generation tools — a detail that, if accurate, would point directly to synthetic origin rather than laboratory observation.
Two former judges of the competition have also weighed in, saying they share concerns about whether the image is real. That intervention is significant, given that judges are normally the people best placed to assess the technical credibility of entries.
Xu has not responded to requests for comment from the BBC. However, he has publicly denied breaking the competition's rules. In a reply to a post published by Nikon on LinkedIn, he did not dispute that AI played a role in processing the image, but insisted he stayed within the rules.
"AI was not used to generate the experimental movie, the cilia, or their motion," he wrote. He acknowledged that AI was used "to distinguish and visualize features in the reconstructed grayscale images."
The video is artificially brightly coloured, a technique that is common in microscopy and explicitly permitted by the contest. Normally, such colour is produced manually by applying stains and dyes to the sample itself before imaging. Xu's position appears to be that his use of AI was limited to enhancement and visualisation rather than fabrication.
Nikon has so far declined to strip Xu of the award. The company said he was "respectfully complying" with its investigation and had supplied additional technical documents to support his entry. In a statement, Nikon said: "At this time, we don't see that any rules were violated," while adding that an update would be issued soon.
The case has struck a nerve because the rules of the contest are explicit. Entrants must capture their material under a microscope, and generative AI is not permitted to produce or alter the content of an entry. The line between legitimate image processing and AI-driven invention is precisely what is now in dispute.
Dr Patrick Hickey, who finished fifth in the 2026 Small World contest, told the BBC that the recognition attached to the prize matters more than the $3,000 (£2,250) award 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.
He also highlighted the artistic dimension of the field, noting that many scientific images possess "some very abstract and artistic qualities." That fusion of science and art is part of what makes the competition appealing to audiences far beyond the research community.
But Hickey was clear that fairness is at stake. He said it would be unfair to other entrants if the winning video turned out to have 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.
The episode reflects a broader reckoning across science and publishing, where AI tools are increasingly embedded in workflows and the boundaries of acceptable use remain unsettled. Microscopy is particularly exposed to the problem, because images are often reconstructed from raw grayscale data and then colourised, sharpened, or otherwise enhanced — steps where generative models can quietly cross from clarifying real data into inventing new detail.
For a competition built on trust in the researcher's bench work, verifying authenticity is difficult. Entries typically arrive as finished files, and judges must rely on their expertise and the honesty of submitters. Watermarks, implausible geometry, and motion that defies biological behaviour are among the few clues available, and all three have been cited in this case.
The outcome now rests with Nikon's review. The company faces a delicate choice: clearing the entry could deepen scepticism among researchers who believe the video is synthetic, while disqualifying it would amount to admitting that its judging process failed to catch a violation. Either way, the controversy has already focused attention on how scientific competitions will police AI in an era when the technology is cheap, fast, and increasingly hard to detect.
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