The annual conference on foreign information manipulation opened in Vilnius this week under a heavy, unspoken cloud. The venue was ready, the panels were set, and the coffee was hot. But the atmosphere among the researchers, journalists, and civil society activists gathering in the Lithuanian capital was more reminiscent of a family reunion trying to avoid a difficult uncle than of a confident community of fact-checkers and democracy defenders. On the agenda was a question that many considered the natural next step for a field that had spent years documenting Russian interference, troll farms, and election meddling: Can the United…

On a quiet Thursday morning in Seoul, a veteran immigration officer at Incheon International Airport stared at a visa application that felt too perfect to be real. The applicant, a young man in his twenties, had submitted a financial statement, a letter of employment, and a travel itinerary, all neatly formatted and completely convincing. Yet something about the supporting documents made the officer pause. The bank logo was slightly off. The font on the employment letter was just a little too uniform. A digital forensic check revealed the truth: every single document had been generated by an advanced AI system,…