The call came on an otherwise ordinary day for Lynn Clark Colpitts, a realtor in the Truro area of Nova Scotia. She answered the phone to a voice on the other end claiming to work in the fraud department at CIBC, one of Canada’s largest banks. The caller had an urgent warning: a credit card application had just been submitted under her name, and she needed to act fast to block it. What followed sounded almost routine to anyone familiar with modern financial scams. The caller instructed her to download a security tool called “CIBC Guard,” a piece of software…

There is no denying that generative artificial intelligence has something magical about it. In a few seconds, it can compose a haunting sonata, draft a short story that reads like Hemingway, or produce a painting in the style of Picasso. It writes emails, helps programmers debug code, assists doctors in summarizing research, and turns a rough paragraph into a polished report. The technology is exploding in capability and use, and every week seems to bring another breakthrough that once felt like science fiction. But underneath the wonder lies an uncomfortable truth. The very same powers that make AI so useful…