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Credit: Ning Xu\/Nikon Small World<\/p>\n
A prestigious videography competition that showcases images of the microscopic world is at the centre of a controversy about AI-use in scientific images. Researchers say that the winning video of this year\u2019s Small World in Motion competition depicts features that are biologically implausible and might have been hallucinated by an artificial-intelligence tool.<\/p>\n
\u201cScientific images are not just illustrations,\u201d says Melanie White, a developmental biologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. \u201cThey are data, and we need to be able to trust that what we are seeing is grounded in the underlying measurement,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n
Markus Sauer, who studies super-resolution microscopy at the University of W\u00fcrzburg in Germany, says that using AI tools to visualize images that represent experimental data is not automatically an issue. It becomes a problem when AI-generated images or videos misrepresent, exaggerate or alter experimental findings, he says.<\/p>\n
Competition winner<\/p>\n
On 15 September, Ning Xu, an optical engineer at the National University of Singapore, was named the winner of the annual competition, which is run by Nikon Instruments and celebrates videos taken using a light microscope. Xu\u2019s entry shows the movement of hair-like structures called cilia that line part of the lungs. The tissue sample was taken from a child with a rare genetic disorder that causes chronic lung, sinus and ear infections called primary ciliary dyskinesia. In the video, the cilia sit on top of red, purple and blue structures, but these are not described in a blog post on the competition website about Xu and his video.<\/p>\n
Days after the announcement, microscopy experts started to question the accuracy of the clip on social media. Edward Phelps, a bioengineering researcher at the University of Florida in Gainesville, wrote on the social-media platform LinkedIn<\/a>: \u201cThe purple structures resemble mitochondria but such a sub-epithelial structure composed of extracellular mitochondria of the same size as cell nuclei does not occur in biology.\u201d He said that although the blue structures resemble nuclei in appearance, they don\u2019t behave like nuclei. It is also unclear what the red stain is supposed to be, he added.<\/p>\n On 22 September, Nikon Instruments updated the blog post<\/a> about Xu\u2019s entry to include that he used an \u201cunsupervised\u201d AI model to assist with \u201cpost-processing\u201d.<\/p>\n