🇮🇹 Italian, 11 October 2026, AI misuse
Nikon Revokes AI-Enhanced Video Prize
The winner of the Nikon Small World in Motion contest was disqualified for using AI to enhance the video.
The video, showcasing the respiratory cilia of a child with a rare genetic disease, was found to have been manipulated with AI. The decision was made after weeks of protests from the scientific community. The first prize now goes to Nguyen Nam Nhat, a Vietnamese microbiologist.
The video was one of the winners of the 16th edition of the Small World in Motion contest, which has been running for over 50 years. The contest is organized by Nikon and rewards images taken with a microscope.
The video was created by Ning Xu, an optical engineer who worked at the University of Tsinghua in Beijing and is now at the National University of Singapore. Xu admitted to using AI in post-production to enhance the images, but claimed that the video itself was not generated by AI.