Nikon disqualifies contest winner for using generative AI

nikon's small world in motion contest had a new first place winner, nguyen nam nhat, after disqualifying original winner dr. ning xu's video for using generative ai in post-processing. dr. xu admitted to using an unsupervised neural-network method for ai-assisted post-processing. nikon plans to revisit rules and evaluation procedures for future competition entries. this incident occurred on oct 9, 2026.