Photo and video competitions have had to deal with fakes and forgeries since their invention, a task that’s become increasingly difficult in the age of generative AI. Many competitions have had to deal with revelations that entries – sometimes even winning ones – were faked or enhanced by AI. Now, it’s happened with one sponsored by Nikon.

The company has disqualified the video that won first place in its Small World in Motion competition, stating it “did not comply with the competition rules regarding generative AI.” That rule is relatively simple: “AI generated videos are not permitted and Sponsor holds the right to request the original video for verification.”

The video in question supposedly showed “abnormal beating of airway cilia in a child with primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD), a rare genetic disorder affecting respiratory function,” and the original press release announcing it as the winner had several paragraphs describing the importance of the imagery and how it was captured.

Nikon’s statement says the decision came “after thoroughly re-evaluating the video and supporting materials and consulting with members of our judging panel.” It also clarifies that the decision “is based solely on the submitted video’s eligibility under the rules outlined for this competition” and “should not be interpreted as a judgment of the entrant’s professional reputation, scientific contributions, or intent.”

What the statement doesn’t say is what role generative AI played in the video’s creation; whether it was fully synthetic, or if it was used to edit something that was once a real image. You can still see it in news coverage of the competition and it looks otherworldly, but, to me, that’s the case for authentic microscopy videos, too. The BBC says the winner “acknowledged using AI,” and reports that other scientists raised the alarm about the video, with one expert in PCD saying that the cells in the video “look nothing like those from PCD patients.”

The company says the incident shows it needs to re-evaluate its rules and procedures moving forward, though as AI tools and people’s familiarity with them and willingness to use them advance, it seems likely that this will continue to happen, despite a growing market of tools designed to identify AI-generated or edited content. The reality is that many of the existing tools are, essentially, guessing, or rely on watermarks embedded by tools made by companies acting in good faith. Someone looking to enter a doctored or generated video into a competition would be able to bypass those relatively easily.

In light of the incident, Nikon has changed the rankings of the Small World In Motion competition, which awards a prize of $3000 for first place. That spot has been awarded to the former second place winner, Nguyen Nam Nhat, who submitted a video of “a tiny roundworm and a single-celled Dileptus” moving around. Second place now belongs to Benedikt Pleyer’s video of jellyfish larvae, and third place goes to Dr. Andrew Moore for their video of “synchronized cell division in neighboring cells.” You can view all the winners on the Nikon Small World website.

Google has made its free tool for identifying SynthID watermarks available to the general public, potentially making it easier to tell whether what you’re looking at was created by or edited with generative AI. While the tool is only looking for a watermark, rather than analyzing the image to see if it’s AI-generated, an increasing number of companies are starting to add SynthIDs to the images, video and audio generated by their AI tools.

The tool, called SynthID Detector, is relatively simple. You can upload an image, video file or audio clip to it, and it will scan for a SynthID. Google says that AI tools from itself, Nvidia, OpenAI and Kakao use the standard, so the tool should be able to tell whether AI was used to create the thing you’ve uploaded. Apple has also promised to start using SynthIDs to watermark its AI-powered photo manipulation tools later this year.

Mitchell Clark

Rather than try to add easily-removed metadata, SynthIDs are invisible watermarks added to AI-generated media, which should theoretically survive modification like cropping, adjusting colors or being compressed by a platform that isn’t even attempting to preserve the watermark. Also importantly, the watermark shouldn’t be detectable in the final output.

There is one somewhat annoying gotcha with the tool: it requires you to sign in with a Google, Apple or OpenAI account to actually check anything. This extra friction may be enough to dissuade someone from casually checking an image, and doesn’t really feel like it should be necessary.

It’s also worth noting that it is very limited. While many major players are represented in the list of companies on board with SynthID, there are plenty that aren’t. As the tool’s homepage warns, it doesn’t detect whether the image was made by AI, it can only tell you whether it was made with a specific subset of models. It’s also binary, only telling you if an image has a watermark or not. Unlike more robust (and, in some ways, more limited) tools like Apple’s Reference Image system or Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) Content Credentials, there’s no way to see the original image, or tell whether the AI simply tweaked a real photo or created an image wholesale.

Mitchell Clark

Still, it’s an important piece of the puzzle as SynthID is gaining popularity. After all, a watermark isn’t particularly useful if it’s invisible and you have no way of checking it. You’ve been able to ask Google Gemini if an image has a SynthID watermark in it for a while now, and Google’s Chrome browser and Search engine will flag images with them in some cases, but the detector is a much lighter-weight solution, and provides an option for those who may be checking an image because they’re morally opposed to using AI, and who likely wouldn’t view being able to ask an AI chatbot about it as an acceptable option.