Nikon AI disqualification leaves winner's university disputed

Nikon's disqualification of the 2026 Small World in Motion first-place video over generative AI was covered here on 10 October 2026. This update adds the two details that story did not carry: the competing accounts of the disqualified entrant's institution, and the full revised finalist order behind the new winner.

Nikon published the decision on its Nikon Small World news page on October 9, 2026. Dr Ning Xu had held first place for a video of tiny, hair-like structures called cilia beating in the airways of a child with the rare respiratory disorder primary ciliary dyskinesia. Ars Technica and BBC News place Xu at Tsinghua University in China, with the BBC calling him a researcher there; PetaPixel instead lists him as an optical engineering researcher at the National University of Singapore.

Nguyen Nam Nhat of Vietnam is now first place, for a video of a tiny roundworm and a single-celled Dileptus exploring their microscopic world. The finalists behind Xu each moved up one spot: Benedikt Pleyer of Bavaria, Germany is second, Andrew Moore of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute third, Patrick Hickey of Hypha Research fourth, and Igor Adameyko fifth.

Small World in Motion is a spinoff of the company's Small World Photomicrography Competition, which Ars Technica dates to 1974. It has run since 2011, and it awards time-lapse and video shot through light microscopes. Its rules are explicit that AI-generated videos are not permitted.

The challenge to Xu's entry came from other scientists. BBC News reported that researchers flagged structural abnormalities, cilia that appeared from nowhere and did not match their known size, and a watermark in a source frame that one PhD student said indicated AI generation. Xu's reply is his own account: in a comment on Nikon's LinkedIn post, he wrote that a neural-network method was used "to distinguish and visualize features in the reconstructed grayscale images," and that "AI was not used to generate the experimental movie, the cilia, or their motion." The Verge reported the same comment: he acknowledged AI in post-processing while denying he broke the rules.

Nikon said the finding rests only on the video's eligibility. It "should not be interpreted as a judgment of the entrant's professional reputation, scientific contributions, or intent," the company wrote, and it added that the episode shows the need to revisit its rules and evaluation procedures for future entries.

For creators, that is the shift. Provenance and disclosure are becoming an eligibility question, and contests that once trusted a submitted file now face the same demand this case turned on: the raw source material.

See the updated winners and the full 2026 rankings in Nikon Small World in Motion's gallery at nikonsmallworld.com.