“The winner of the Nikon Small World in Motion competition is under investigation,” writes the photography news site PetaPixel , “after scientists accused Dr Ning Xu of using AI in his video.”

The Nikon competition is about showcasing the beauty, complexity, and artistry of the microscopic world. The entries are abstract, often baffling to laypeople. But when Dr Xu was announced as the winner last month, members of the scientific community began to cry foul. “There are many serious problems with this video,” Edward Phelps, associate professor at Florida University, says on LinkedIn. Phelps points out that “purple structures pop in and out of existence” and “green cilia also appear from nowhere and do not match the known size.”

Dr Xu’s video is supposed to show the movement of cilia, which are hair-like structures that line part of the lungs… However, since Dr Xu won the prize, Nikon Small World updated its LinkedIn post celebrating his triumph with a note that reads: “Regarding questions raised about this year’s Small World In Motion winning video, Nikon is carefully re-reviewing the information provided during the initial vetting, along with additional supporting materials from the entrant.” Nikon adds that Dr 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.”

Worse still, Ian Donovan, an MD/PhD Student at UT Southwestern Medical Center, says he ran the video through Google Gemini, and the result came back with an invisible Google SynthID watermark that indicates at least some of the video is AI-generated. Dr Xu, an optical engineering researcher at the National University of Singapore, reportedly responded to the LinkedIn post. According to Nature, Dr Xu accepted that he had used an AI model to assist with post-processing but denied breaking the rules of the competition, which clearly 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. However, Dr Xu’s messages on the LinkedIn post can’t be found as of today (October 1), and his LinkedIn profile now appears to have been deleted entirely.

Meanwhile, some college students “see a double standard when colleges penalize them for outsourcing academic work to AI but allow similar use by institutional leaders,” writes Entrepreneur magazine:

According to a recent report from The New York Times, Dartmouth College students are calling out a top professor for allegedly using AI to help with writing… The school’s provost, Santiago Schnell, faced allegations of AI use last week from the college’s 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 said in a statement to the student-run newspaper, The Dartmouth, 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.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Guardian reports that California governor Gavin Newsom signed laws on Wednesday “aimed at protecting California workers from the threats of artificial intelligence , including potential job losses and workplace surveillance.”
The laws ban employers from using the technology to predict a worker’s emotional state by using their biometric data, require employers to send written notices to workers if AI is responsible for mass layoffs and ban employers from relying on AI to decide to fire someone… The governor signed a law this month requiring operators of AI chatbots to perform risk assessments before rolling them out and an executive order requiring the state to consult with experts to further improve oversight over the industry.

The law includes “expanded tracking of AI’s economic effects” leading to recommendations on how to best “adapt job-training and public-benefit programs,” according to the governor’s office. “California has also launched an AI Unemployment Tracker and solicited statewide public input on AI’s economic impacts through Engaged California.”

But two weeks ago Politico reported that the governor also signed executive orders to “explore proposals like requiring that AI companies develop a ‘kill switch’ for their most advanced models.”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who called for a slowdown in AI development amid existential risk concerns, said… that while a kill switch “could be a good idea,” it was no “panacea….” [California lawmakers] were generally supportive of Newsom’s plan and showed signs of coalescing around the kill switch idea, which was stripped out of legislation proposed two years ago. Rep. Ted Lieu, who introduced bipartisan kill switch legislation in the House, boosted Newsom’s call for Congress to mirror California’s approach.

But not everyone supports this approach, including the Free Software Foundation’s campaigns manager, Greg Farough:

FSF: Having control over the technology we use is a fundamental part of software freedom. Without it, you simply don’t have the basic freedoms you deserve when doing any type of computing, large or small. Don’t let “artificial intelligence” be an exception: all users everywhere deserve complete control over their own computing. While it’s understandable to be pleased by this news from California, Newsom’s executive order also invites questions about the “kill switch” itself that could matter a great deal for freedom. Assuming such a kill switch was developed, who would really control it?

We hope our readers understand the problems inherent in giving one single or a small number of kill switches to anyone. Newsom wisely wants an independent organization to verify their functionality, but even this still sets too dangerous of a precedent. We cannot allow such centralization of power over our computing to become commonplace, especially by the corporations that provide these models in the first place. We also cannot trust even the most well-intentioned “independent organization” to take care of its verification.

Giving users the freedom that they deserve over large languages models would be an enormous departure from how most are developed and used today. But, if any group is capable of coming up with such a plan, it’s the experts mentioned in Newsom’s order. Like he states at the beginning of his executive order, the vast majority of them are already right there in California. We urge the Government Operations Agency to consider the precedent they are setting, and ask them to write their recommendation to the governor in ways that puts the freedom and dignity of the individual user first and foremost.

The Guardian adds that Newsom also signed an executive order this week “to require state agencies to continue to refer to the technology as ‘artificial intelligence’ instead of the term ‘super intelligence’ as Donald Trump recently ordered US diplomats to use.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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