In 1997, I was sent to Bougainville, not as a combat soldier but as part of a military information support team. The island had just come through a brutal civil war, and a fragile truce was holding by a thread. In that setting, the most dangerous weapon wasn’t always a gun. It was a rumour. Information moved slowly and lived in face-to-face conversations, in village meetings, in whispers passed along jungle paths. If someone started a story about what one group intended to do to another, it could harden suspicion overnight and tear apart the trust needed to keep the…

Imagine scrolling through your feed and suddenly seeing a video of a political leader announcing something that would change everything—a sudden military deployment, a resignation, a national emergency. Your heart races. You feel the urge to share it before your brain catches up. Then, moments later, you learn it was fabricated with artificial intelligence. That moment is no longer hypothetical. During the ongoing 2026 US midterm cycle, political organizations have already released realistic AI-generated videos of candidates saying things they never said, sometimes with disclosures so tiny they are easy to miss. This is happening all over the world. Brazil’s…