There is a moment, when you read a letter that says what you have been circling for years, when the argument suddenly feels both obvious and urgent. That was my reaction to Aneet Morar’s response to the Guardian’s editorial on Russian disinformation. Yes, the warning from Andy Burnham about the Kremlin was important, and yes, it captured something real about foreign interference in British democracy. But as Morar argues, it really only tells half the story. The harder truth is that disinformation has become just one symptom of a much deeper failure: we have allowed a handful of private companies…

The relentless march of artificial intelligence has brought us to a peculiar and unsettling crossroads, one where the very fabric of reality is becoming increasingly difficult to discern. We are at a point where the artificial has become so sophisticated in its mimicry of the human touch—our faces, our voices, our art—that our natural instincts, our “gut feelings,” are no longer reliable guides. This was never more evident than in a recent experiment conducted by Lydia Ray, a professor of computer science and cybersecurity researcher at Columbus State University. For years, Ray has dedicated her professional life to studying the…