There is something both absurd and heartbreaking about the idea of a person waking up one morning to discover that the internet has announced their death, and that quietly grieving strangers have already sent love and prayers to a family that is not in mourning. That is what happened to veteran Tamil actress Vadivukkarasi, a beloved figure in Tamil cinema for more than four decades. A wave of unconfirmed reports swept through social media, claiming that the veteran performer had fallen seriously ill, and then, even more shockingly, that she had passed away. Those rumours, repeated in anxious messages and…

Imagine a bright-eyed eight-year-old sitting at a kitchen table with a tablet, asking an artificial intelligence chatbot to explain a news story they saw online. Within seconds, a confident, convincing answer appears on the screen. The child doesn’t know that the response may be subtly distorted, entirely invented, or deliberately designed to push a political agenda. This is not a rare, dystopian scene from the future; it is an everyday reality for many Irish families. A troubling new warning from the Blue Star Programme reveals that more than half of national school children are now using Artificial Intelligence, and a…