Nikon Microscopy Prize Winner Accused of AI Use as Dartmouth Provost Faces Similar Claims

Xu, an optical engineering researcher at the National University of Singapore, was announced as the winner last month. The Nikon competition is intended to showcase the beauty, complexity and artistry of the microscopic world, and its entries are often abstract and difficult for laypeople to interpret. Once Xu's win was announced, members of the scientific community objected.

Edward Phelps, an associate professor at Florida University, wrote on LinkedIn that there are many serious problems with the video. Phelps said purple structures pop in and out of existence, and that green cilia appear from nowhere and do not match the known size. Xu's video is supposed to show the movement of cilia, the hair-like structures that line part of the lungs.

Nikon Small World has since updated the LinkedIn post celebrating Xu's win. Regarding questions raised about this year's Small World In Motion winning video, the company said it is carefully re-reviewing the information provided during the initial vetting, along with additional supporting materials from the entrant. Nikon added that Xu is respectfully complying and has provided detailed technical documentation outlining the microscopy equipment, imaging methods and processing techniques used to create the source video.

Ian Donovan, an MD/PhD student at UT Southwestern Medical Center, said he ran the video through Google Gemini, and the result came back with an invisible Google SynthID watermark indicating that at least some of the video is AI-generated.

Xu responded to the LinkedIn post, according to Nature, accepting that he had used an AI model to assist with post-processing while denying that he broke competition rules, which state that AI-generated videos are not permitted. It was applied afterwards to the reconstructed grayscale data to distinguish and color structures with similar morphology, he wrote. As of October 1, his messages on the LinkedIn post could not be found, and his LinkedIn profile appeared to have been deleted entirely.

A separate dispute over AI use in academic work has emerged at Dartmouth College, where students see a double standard when colleges penalize them for outsourcing academic work to AI but allow similar use by institutional leaders, Entrepreneur magazine reported. According to a recent report in The New York Times, Dartmouth students are calling out a top professor for allegedly using AI to help with writing. The college's provost, Santiago Schnell, faced allegations of AI use last week from the student-run newspaper, which detected AI in some of his published writing. The college said it was launching an investigation into the written work.

Schnell told The Dartmouth in a statement that he used AI for language refinement, copyediting, improving clarity and organization, and making writing processes more efficient. The newspaper ran his statement through an AI detector, which said that Schnell had used AI to write it, too.

Editor's Summary

Nikon is re-examining the winning video of its Small World in Motion competition after researchers and an outside student said it shows signs of AI generation, while the entrant acknowledges using AI for post-processing and denies violating rules that bar AI-generated videos. At Dartmouth College, the provost is under investigation after the student newspaper detected AI in some of his published writing, and an AI detector flagged his response to the allegations as well. Both cases center on how institutions draw the line between AI-assisted processing or editing and prohibited AI-generated work.