The winning work of a scientific photography competition will be checked due to suspicions of the use of AI

The winning work of a prestigious scientific photography competition was re-examined after scientists suspected that artificial intelligence was used in its creation.

The annual Nikon Small World In Motion competition has been running for 15 years and accepts photographs and videos taken using high-power microscopes.

This year's winner was a short video submitted by Dr. Ning Xu, a researcher at Tsinghua University in China. The author claims that the video captured the movement of tiny hair-like structures - cilia - in the airways of a child suffering from a rare disease.

Xu did not respond to the BBC's request for comment but posted a statement online denying he had broken the competition rules.

In response to Nikon's LinkedIn post, Xu did not deny that he used artificial intelligence in image processing, but said that he did not violate the rules of the competition.

“AI was not used to create the experimental video, the cilia themselves, or their movement,” he wrote.

Xu's video is painted in artificially bright colors, a common practice in microscopy that is allowed by the competition rules. As a rule, for this purpose the sample is manually colored with special dyes.

Xu acknowledged that AI was used "to extract and visualize features of the reconstructed grayscale images."

However, other scientists have drawn attention to a number of details that, in their opinion, cast doubt on the authenticity of the video. In particular, they argue that some shapes and movements do not correspond to the normal structure and behavior of cells, and the cilia themselves look too large.

University of Florida Associate Professor Edward Phelps, commenting on Nikon's social media post, noted that some structures in the video "appear and disappear" and eyelashes "appear out of nowhere."

Ian Donovan, a graduate student at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, said that the original image appears to have a distinctive watermark indicating the use of generative AI.

Two former members of the competition jury also expressed doubts about the authenticity of the work.

Nikon said Xu is “cooperating fully” with the review and has already provided the company with additional technical documents.

Dr Patrick Hickey, who placed fifth in the 2026 Small World competition, says the recognition that comes from entering a competition is far more important than the $3,000 cash prize.

“If you spend most of your time in a dark room looking through a microscope, it's really nice to be able to show your work to other people, to the general public,” he said. “It’s an interesting combination of science and art: many of the images that scientists create have quite abstract and artistic qualities.”

According to Hickey, if the winning video was found to have been inappropriately altered by AI, it would be unfair to other participants.

“The competition has a clear set of rules. One of them explicitly says that generative AI cannot be used to create images. Another obvious requirement is that the material must be imaged using a microscope,” he said.