Donald Trump recently described the attempt on his life as the work of a “lone wolf whack job.” But is that description clinically accurate? 🧠 Consultant Psychiatrist Dr. Raj Persaud dives into the forensic research to explain why US assassinations are unique, why the motives are rarely political, and the “neglected variable” of medical chaos. Featuring rare first-hand testimony from the surgeon who tried to save JFK. Key Topics Covered: The “Whack Job” Myth: Why labeling attackers as “crazy” makes them harder to catch. Forensic Profiling: Why American assassins act alone while the rest of the world organizes. The Psychology of Resentment: Why the US President becomes a target for personal failures. Parkland Trauma Room 1: Reading the chilling testimony of JFK’s surgeon, Ronald Jones. Trump’s Resilience: Why the President’s post-attack behavior reveals a “Goal Achiever” personality.
In the 120 years since Alzheimer’s disease was first identified, scientists have worked to unravel the biological details of how it develops and progresses, with the goal of finding ways to prevent it or slow its effects.
Since the 1980s, much of that research has centered on two proteins implicated in the pathology of the disease — amyloid beta protein, which forms plaques between brain cells, and tau protein, which forms twisted fibers called neurofibrillary tangles inside neurons. Scientific interest in Alzheimer’s has been bolstered by the disease’s enormous impact on the aging population: It is currently estimated to affect more than 55 million people worldwide, and that number is expected to rise to more than 150 million by 2050.
“Alzheimer’s disease has proven to be a difficult clinical and scientific problem that until recently has resisted effective therapeutic intervention,” says Bruce Yankner, a professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School who studies the molecular genetics of aging and neurodegenerative disorders.“For many years, the focus was on the constituent proteins of the pathology, but there was limited understanding of the disease in its entirety.”
Currently, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s, but the FDA recently approved two new drugs that partially remove amyloid plaques. The therapies, lecanemab and donanemab, mark an important advance in Alzheimer’s treatment “because they address causal factors in the disease rather than just the symptoms,” Yankner says. He notes, however, that while the drugs reduce the rate of cognitive decline in people with early Alzheimer’s, they do not prevent the disease from progressing or restore lost cognitive function. “It is a good first step, but we have some distance to go in treating this disease,” he says.
Yankner, who is also a co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard, leads one of an interconnected network of Alzheimer’s labs at HMS and its affiliated hospitals studying everything from the most basic biology of the disease to the most promising new avenues for treatment. His recent research focuses on gene regulation and the role of lithium — recently found to be a physiological element — in cognitive function, aging, and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.Sandeep Robert Datta and Chenghua Gu, both professors of neurobiology at HMS, have pivoted more recently to Alzheimer’s research. Datta is focusing on how the immune system may interact with proteins in the brain to cause the disease, and Gu’s newly launched project is investigating how vascular changes in the brain may contribute.
Together, Yankner, Datta, and Gu are tackling the basic biology of Alzheimer’s from three different angles — a strategy that they feel is essential in a field where progress toward effective treatments has been slow. “I think it’s very important to have a broad research approach, because it’s impossible to predict what is going to bear the most fruit — and sometimes major advances come from unrelated areas of research,” Yankner says.
“I think we should be pluralistic and not partisan,” Datta adds. “There are many, many potential drug targets, any of which could be the key.”
Moreover, Gu notes, casting a wide net protects against devoting too much time and energy to a single research topic in what has proven to be a highly complex and multifaceted disease. “If you bark up the wrong tree, the whole field can be delayed for a long time,” she cautions.
Wide-ranging research
The Yankner Lab initially described how genes are regulated during the aging of the brain and what drives the transition from normal aging to Alzheimer’s disease at a molecular level. Researchers in the lab recently discovered that lithium is found naturally in the brain and other tissues and may play a key role in the disease.An important observation was that lithium is significantly depleted in the brains of older adults with early memory loss, and this change becomes more pronounced with progression to Alzheimer’s disease. “Lithium deficiency appears to occur at two levels: an early reduction in the brain related to reduced uptake, and a later sequestration of brain lithium by amyloid plaques that renders it inaccessible to brain cells,” Yankner says.
When the lab replicated this loss of lithium in mice, the animals developed the cardinal pathological features and cognitive symptoms that define Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers built on these findings to discover a new class of lithium compounds that resist inactivation by amyloid and are highly effective at reducing the pathology of the disease and restoring memory in mouse models. Together, the results provide a new conceptual paradigm for how Alzheimer’s disease may begin.
Yankner says that lithium may help explain a long-standing conundrum in the field: why in some people there is little correlation between dementia and the amount of plaques and tangles in the brain.“People who are able to maintain higher lithium levels may be resistant to the pathology,” he says. “We have data suggesting a correlation between brain lithium and cognitive function in the normal aging population. This is consistent with our experiments in mice in which lithium deprivation during aging results in memory loss even in the absence of Alzheimer-type pathology.” His lab plans to test the hypothesis in larger, long-term studies of the aging human population.
Yankner is also collaborating with physicians at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital on a clinical trial that will test whether one of the newly discovered lithium compounds, lithium orotate, is safe and effective in aging individuals with early memory loss and Alzheimer’s. “The results in mouse models are encouraging, but we won’t know about the potential of lithium orotate as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease until we test it in a randomized clinical trial,” he says.
Datta followed his work on the basic biology of smell into Alzheimer’s research: Over a decade ago, his team discovered a new family of odor receptors that express a gene also implicated as an Alzheimer’s risk factor.
Datta and his team are investigating how this gene might promote Alzheimer’s. They observed that inactivating the gene in mice reduced some Alzheimer’s symptoms. Then, they figured out that the gene enables communication between two types of immune cells: microglia inside the brain and T cells outside the brain. In mice with Alzheimer’s, tau activated microglia, which recruited T cells into the brain and worked with them to cause damage via inflammation. When the gene was inactivated in microglia or T cells, the immune cells stopped interacting.
“This single Alzheimer’s risk gene appears to be acting on two different cell types to facilitate communication between immune systems in the brain and blood, and that interaction seems to be critical for generating Alzheimer’s disease,” Datta says. He adds that the results may also help explain why “just having your brain filled with amyloid or tau isn’t enough to develop Alzheimer’s.”
Datta’s research is ongoing, but he is hopeful that it may offer a new treatment strategy that centers on targeting immune cells — particularly T cells, which are accessible in the blood. “It’s now obvious that your whole immune system changes as a consequence of Alzheimer’s, and that has a lot of practical implications,” he says.
Gu’s entry into Alzheimer’s research is even more recent than Datta’s. Her lab studies two key parts of the brain’s vascular system: the blood-brain barrier, a tightly woven layer of cells that controls access to the brain, and neurovascular coupling, the brain’s mechanism for increasing blood flow to active areas on demand.
Gu’s previous work explored how cells in and around the blood-brain barrier regulate its permeability. Her research on neurovascular coupling revealed how cells lining blood vessels in the brain communicate where blood is needed.
As Gu delved deeper into these systems, she learned that both are known to break down in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. The blood-brain barrier becomes leaky, allowing substances that may damage neurons to enter the brain, while neurovascular coupling becomes impaired, so the brain can no longer efficiently and selectively direct blood.
Gu’s new project is exploring what she calls a “chicken-or-egg” question: whether changes to blood vessels and blood flow in the brain result from or cause Alzheimer’s. Her lab is developing mouse models to probe the genes and pathways that may drive these changes. Since they occur long before amyloid or tau build up, she thinks studying them is essential for understanding the earliest stages of disease.
“I think there’s been a gradual realization in the field that these vascular changes may be an important contributor to Alzheimer’s,” she says.
A focus on the basics
The researchers agree that progress on Alzheimer’s treatments has been hindered by a lack of basic biological understanding, and that scientists need to interrogate every facet of the disease’s fundamental biology, from proteins and genes to immune components and vascular changes.
“I think pretending that we can cure a disease we don’t fully understand is not really a thing — we can’t just try a bunch of stuff and hope something works,” Datta says. “We need a rational approach, and that is going to take time and understanding of biology.”
Datta adds that because Alzheimer’s involves multiple, interacting systems in the body, understanding it will require an integrative view of its biology. “There is definitely a greater appreciation that as this disease progresses, it moves through phases in which the key players are evolving,” he says. “We need to study all of the players to understand the steps that take you from healthy to sick.”
Or, as Gu puts it, “It’s like we are all working on different corners of a puzzle, and at some point, the full picture will emerge.”
Yet even while focusing on the basic biology, the researchers keep the ultimate goal top of mind: to translate findings from the lab to the clinic. “You always ask yourself, when is the best time to develop a therapy?” Gu says. “If you know very little, the biology won’t be correct and the therapy won’t work — but you also don’t need to wait until everything is known.”
Datta is especially encouraged by the fact that current Alzheimer’s medications do seem to help some patients in certain situations. “That’s a crucial proof of concept that this is an intervenable disease, which has basically changed the conversation,” he says. “It’s clear that you can build a drug that works in humans and changes lives.”
The researchers remain optimistic that as a more complete picture of the biology of Alzheimer’s emerges, so too will new and more effective treatments and interventions. “I think we’re now poised to have a substantial impact on the disease. This is the time to push the boundaries of research on Alzheimer’s in many directions,” Yankner says.
Catherine Caruso is a senior science writer in the HMS Office of Communications and External Relations.
Norah O’Donnell sat down with President Trump to discuss the moment he was rushed out of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner after a gunman charged a security checkpoint. Editor’s note: The video above is an extended version of the interview that was broadcast on 60 Minutes on Sunday, April 26, 2026. “60 Minutes” is the most successful television broadcast in history. Offering hard-hitting investigative reports, interviews, feature segments and profiles of people in the news, the broadcast began in 1968 and is still a hit, over 50 seasons later, regularly making Nielsen’s Top 10.
The least competent people are often the most confident. This is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where people with limited skill or knowledge in a particular area dramatically overestimate their own abilities. The reason is simple yet paradoxical: the same skills needed to do something well are also the skills needed to accurately judge how well you’re doing it. Without that self-awareness, incompetent individuals remain blissfully unaware of their shortcomings — and become overly confident as a result.
As Charles Darwin noted: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” On the flip side, truly skilled people often fall into the opposite trap. Because a task feels easy to them, they assume it must be easy for everyone else. As a result, experts tend to underestimate their own abilities relative to others, while the least competent loudly overestimate theirs.
This creates a striking gap: the people who know the least are often the most sure of themselves, while the most competent frequently doubt their own superiority.
AI vs. Human Experience: Where Words Fall Short. AI vs Human Experience
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View in web browser AI vs. Human Experience: Where Words Fall Short Exploring the elusive divide between AI representation and experience.By John Nosta
KEY POINTS:AI masters description but can never deliver experience.The real risk is fluency that hides the missing depth.We may be losing the instinct to notice the difference.Source: Alexa/Pixabay
When I was in college, we made a compound in organic chemistry that smelled like a banana. It was called amyl acetate. If you closed your eyes, it was convincing enough to make you smile. But it wasn’t a banana. Today that playful distinction no longer feels trivial because we’ve built systems that live entirely on the description side of the boundary. I can describe a banana split in exhaustive detail—cost, temperature, the viscosity of melting ice cream against other ingredients—and still not tell you what it is. There is a moment when description ends and experience begins, and that moment only arrives with a spoon. The same is true of love. Shakespeare and Rumi have approached it from different directions, each line of words bringing us closer to something we recognize. But no cluster of language ever becomes the thing itself. Love is not understood until it happens to you.Until it changes you.
There is a boundary here and on that we feel more than we define. Representation can approach experience with an almost asymptotic fidelity, yet never become it.
Where Description Stops The key insight here is that you can know everything about something and still not know what it is. That isn’t a failure of information. This gap isn’t about quantity, it’s about what information can never be.Experience carries properties that description cannot capture. It is irreversible and unfolds in the context of time. You can’t un-experience something any more than you can unlearn a moment that has changed you.
Language, in direct contrast, is free of consequence as it can describe without being changed. That distinction has always been part of being human. What feels different now is where it shows up.
One Absence, Seven Names We’ve begun to build artificial intelligence that operates entirely within representation.Large language models generate sentences that are remarkably coherent and hard to distinguish from genuine understanding. But fluency is not understanding, and the feeling of depth is not depth. That’s a sentence worth reading twice.
A fascinating paper by Quattrociocchi and associates identifies seven places where human and artificial cognition structurally diverge. But to me, what their taxonomy doesn’t quite say is that all seven point back to the same absence of experience. The authors call the resulting condition Epistemia—the sensation of having an answer without having done the work of forming one.
I’ve been thinking about this as a question of direction rather than deficit. We need to understand that human cognition moves through experience and is permanently altered in this process.AI moves across representations, mapping patterns in language and recombining them with techno-precision. And this can feel, from the outside, indistinguishable from thought. Both can arrive at the same sentence without arriving there the same way. I’ve called this anti-intelligence. A system that produces cognitively valid outputs without the conditions that make cognition real. The Danger Isn’t the GapAI gets us close enough to be fooled, and that’s where the real problem begins. The sentence is convincing, the explanation lands squarely in a place of logical contentment. And it’s easy to assume that as representation improves it will eventually cross into experience. But the banana chemical can become arbitrarily more precise and still not be a banana. There is no gradual crossing, only approach.What concerns me more than the gap itself is what Epistemia does to the person on the receiving end. It doesn’t just deliver the sensation of an answer, it gradually erodes the habit of noticing when something is missing.Experience leaves a mark or even a cognitive scar that description never really replicates. And once that mark fades, we might not miss it. That’s the part worth worrying about.John NostaThe Digital Self Technology, Transformation and the Future You
View in browser PRESENTED BY META Axios AM Deep DiveBy Mike Allen · Apr 26, 2026
This special report brings you Axios’ latest reporting on how Washington responded to the attack on last night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Thanks to executive editor Kate Marino for leading this special issue, and to Axios journalists nationwide — some working with kids in their laps — who logged on to help bring you trustworthy, illuminating coverage.Catch up quick on the investigation.Smart Brevity™ count: 1,363 words … 5 mins. 1 big thing: Future in limbo for D.C. tradition The Washington Hilton ballroom emptied after last night’s scare. Photo: Tom Brenner/AP
For decades, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner has been a treasured tradition, uniting the press and politicians under one roof at the storied Washington Hilton. Now, the future of that ritual is in question, Axios’ Sara Fischer writes.
Why it matters: Last night’s intruder will force security officials and the White House Correspondents’ Association to reconsider whether it’s safe to host the dinner again in that venue, and how the event may need to evolve.
President Trump said last night that the dinner will be held again within 30 days. Media executives Axios spoke with are skeptical that it’ll be staged exactly the same way.
Hundreds of corporate executives, diplomats and even celebrities fly in for the event, many with their own security teams and protocols.
The event requires months of planning for attendees, journalists and administration officials, let alone police and the Secret Service.
Zoom in: The dinner, which takes place in the basement ballroom at the Washington Hilton — the same hotel where President Reagan was shot in 1981 — seats 2,000-plus people at nearly 260 tables. Those tables are packed so closely that it can be tough to even get out to walk to the restrooms.
After the attack, the Secret Service leaped on tables, across fallen chairs — even over guests — as they yanked Cabinet members from the room.Screenshot: Truth Social
How it works: Various news organizations host pre-parties at the Hilton that include guests not attending the dinner. So there were likely hundreds more people in the hotel — in close proximity to dozens of officials and CEOs — who weren’t even attending the dinner.
The big picture: Since 9/11, government buildings have become much less accessible to the public. But many big public establishments, including the Washington Hilton, remain easy to enter.
The bottom line: The dinner this year was supposed to represent a rare moment of bonding between the administration and the press. It became a wake-up call about security risks that could upend the tradition.
A Persian scholar finished a single math book in 9th century Baghdad that quietly became the foundation for every line of code running on Earth today. I started reading about him at midnight and could not believe how many things in my daily life trace back to one man.
His name was Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. The book is called The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing. Every time you say the word algebra, you are saying his book title. Every time someone says the word algorithm, they are saying his name. Both English words come from him. Both are Latin transliterations of Arabic and of his own identity. The man did not just contribute to mathematics. He named it. Here is the part almost nobody tells you. Al-Khwarizmi was born around 780 CE in Khwarazm, in what is now Uzbekistan.He moved to Baghdad and worked at a research institution called the House of Wisdom, which during the Islamic Golden Age was the single most important center of learning on the planet. The caliph al-Mamun hired the best mathematicians, astronomers, and philosophers from across three continents and put them in one building with one job. Translate, study, and produce new knowledge.
Al-Khwarizmi finished his book on algebra around 820 CE. The Arabic title contained the word al-jabr, which referred to one of the two operations he used to solve equations. When the book was translated into Latin in the 12th century, the Latin world did not have a word for what he had built. So they kept his Arabic word. Al-jabr became algebra. The discipline was named after a single Arabic word in the title of a single book by a single man.
The deeper insight is what he actually changed about how humans think.Before al-Khwarizmi, mathematical problems were solved geometrically. You drew shapes. You measured them. You compared areas. The Greeks had built an entire mathematical tradition on visual proofs and physical constructions. It was beautiful and limited. You could not solve a problem you could not draw. Al-Khwarizmi did something nobody had done before him at this scale. He said you could solve any problem using abstract symbols and rules. You did not need a shape. You needed a procedure. You moved terms across the equation. You cancelled like terms on both sides. You isolated the unknown. He invented the idea that mathematics is a manipulation of symbols according to rules, not a study of physical figures. That single shift made everything that came afterward possible.
Calculus. Differential equations. Linear algebra. Quantum mechanics. None of it works if math is locked inside geometry. He pulled it out. The second thing he did is the one that changed how the world counted forever. He took the Hindu numeral system from Indian mathematics, refined it, and wrote a book introducing it to the Arab world.That system included the concept of zero as a placeholder, and a positional notation where the value of a digit depends on its location.
Roman numerals could not do complex calculation. Hindu-Arabic numerals could. When his book on numerals was translated into Latin as Algoritmi de numero Indorum, the word Algoritmi was just the Latin spelling of his own name. Europeans started calling the new method “doing algorism,” then “running an algorithm.” The word for the most important concept in computer science is literally his name in Latin. The third thing he did is the part that should haunt anyone who works in tech. His method of solving problems was systematic. Step one, do this. Step two, check that. Step three, if condition A, then do X, otherwise do Y.
He wrote down procedures that could be followed by anyone, anywhere, who knew how to read.The procedure did not depend on intuition or genius.It worked because the steps worked. That is exactly what an algorithm is.A finite, deterministic procedure for solving a problem. He did not just give us the word. He gave us the entire concept of programming a thousand years before there was anything to program.
When Alan Turing built the first abstract model of computation in 1936, when John von Neumann designed the first stored-program computer in 1945, when every engineer at Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind writes code in 2026, they are working in a paradigm that started with one man in Baghdad twelve centuries ago. The strangest part is what happens when you walk into any tech office in San Francisco or Bangalore or Lahore today. Engineers say the words algebra and algorithm hundreds of times a day. They do not know whose name they are saying. Almost nobody can spell al-Khwarizmi correctly on the first try. His original Arabic manuscript is preserved at Oxford. His book on Hindu numerals survives only in Latin translation. The Latin version was the textbook that taught medieval Europe how to count.
The man who built the foundation of the AI revolution did not live to see a calculator. He died around 850 CE, a thousand years before the first electric current was sent through a wire. The civilization he built mathematics for collapsed. The library he wrote in burned. His own grave is unmarked. But every algorithm running on every machine on Earth right now still answers to his name.
While AI technology is new, information warfare is as old as conflict itself. For millennia, humans have used propaganda, deception and psychological operations to influence adversaries’ decision-making and morale. In the 13th century, for instance, the Mongols destroyed entire cities just so word of mouth would spread to the next, with the goal of breaking morale and forcing it to capitulate before troops even arrived.
As technology has progressed, it has opened new frontiers in information warfare. From the Second World War to the 1991 Gulf War, planes dropped leaflets to spread rumours and propaganda. During the Vietnam War, English-language radio shows presented by Hanoi Hannah (real name Trịnh Thị Ngọ) taunted US troops with lists of their locations and casualties to lower morale.Radio propaganda also demonstrated its devastating effect when it was used to guide the Rwandan Genocide in 1994.
Cable TV came next. The 1991 Gulf War was the first major conflict broadcast on a 24 hour news cycle as opposed to the evening news. Instead of daily updates in bulletins or newspapers, people at home began receiving a continuous stream of information and images that was invariably biased towards national interests. This technological shift defined public perceptions of the war, and led historians to dub it the “CNN War”.
What we are witnessing today is the next step in this evolution – from print, radio and TV to social media. If the First Gulf War was the CNN war, the 2025 and 2026 conflict between the US, Israel and Iran can be thought of as the first TikTok War, and the first major AI War.
AI has ushered in new forms of information warfare that target perceptions, information environments, and trust itself. AI-generated videos in particular have fundamentally altered how states and non-state actors wage information warfare, manipulate populations, and compete not only in the Gulf, but in a global arena.
But this technology also convincingly and easily creates propaganda material that is obviously fiction. The most notable example is Iran’s viral Lego videos that have repeatedly – and very successfully – mocked Israel and the US throughout the war.
To fully understand the disruptive potential of AI videos, we can go back and look at the futurist speculation of dystopian science fiction novels.Science fiction author William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in his 1983 novel Neuromancer, describing it as a “consensual hallucination” – not reality, but rather a “graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system”.
But when digital tools like AI videos and social media are used as weapons, the barrier between cyberspace and physical reality becomes permeable.They no longer create virtual reality, but what French media theorist Jean Baudrillard called “hyperreality”. This term describes a state in which the distinction between reality and a simulation of reality collapses, where the simulation feels “more real than real”.
Bauldrillard’s work is underpinned by the concept of “simulacra”: copies or representations of something that really exists. He classified simulacra in three orders. The first order is the pre-industrial counterfeit – a faithful copy or replica of a real object – while the second is the mechanically mass-produced object.
Third order simulacra are simulations, or signs with absolutely no physical form. Take Iran’s Lego videos, which depict scenes such as Trump and Netanyahu using the Iran War as a pretext to distract from the Epstein files while worshipping the pagan Canaanite deity Baal. They have nothing to do with the intentions of the Danish company that makes the ubiquitous plastic brick toys, and yet they have gained enormous traction as viral meme propaganda – both in the West and around the world.
AI is the message
Media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s oft-quoted phrase “the medium is the message” argues that, irrespective of the messages transmitted by media – be it newspaper, radio or TV – the medium in and of itself also tells us something.
The content of Iranian, US and Israeli AI videos are, naturally, entirely different, as each seeks to undermine their opponents’ narratives. But the medium of AI videos shared on social media also sends a message: these videos transcend an adversary’s borders in ways that previous media could not.
Unlike the pamphlets, radio broadcasts and TV networks of before, AI’s production and consumption are geographically unbound. Anyone can make and view it anywhere – whether in Tehran, Tel Aviv, Washington or anywhere else in the world. What this has created is a new era of borderless, decentralised, viral, digital public diplomacy.
Unlike Iran’s Lego videos, AI deepfakes are realistic but entirely fabricated content, making it difficult for viewers to discern truth from falsehood. Early iterations were crude and easily identifiable, but modern deepfakes have reached a level of photorealism and vocal authenticity that can deceive even experienced observers and automated detection systems.
During the so-called “12-Day War” in 2025 in Israel and Iran, AI deepfakes and video game footage sought to replicate real combat.Fabricated visuals included scenes of destroyed Israeli aircraft, collapsing buildings in Tel Aviv and its airport, while others showed Israeli strikes on Tehran that left a crater in an intersection and sent cars flying.
But believability isn’t always paramount. One widely-shared image of a downed Israeli F-35 fighter was taken from a flight simulator game. The plane was obviously too large compared to the bystanders on the ground, but this didn’t stop the image from going viral (it got 23 million views on TikTok) or from being spread by networks sympathetic to Russia seeking to demonstrate the vulnerability of American-made aircraft.
In total, the three most viewed deepfake videos during the 2025 war received 100 million views across social media. One deepfake video that circulated on Facebook even depicted Israeli officials pleading for the US to enforce a ceasefire, claiming “we cannot fight Iran any longer”.
This content was disseminated on TikTok, Telegram and X, where the AI chatbot Grok failed to identify fabricated videos that used footage from other conflicts.
Legal scholars have coined the phrases “liar’s dividend” and “truth decay” to characterise this ongoing trend towards fabricating reality. These terms refer to a media landscape where AI-driven fakes cast even legitimate evidence into doubt, eroding trust to the point where any image or medium can now be dismissed as a deepfake.
The most recent 2025 to 2026 wars demonstrate that, as states race to develop drones, missiles and defence systems, a parallel arms race is unfolding online. The digital revolution, coupled with advances in AI, has exponentially increased the speed, scale and sophistication of information manipulation. This conflict heralds a new era of information warfare, one where AI technologies are weaponised to influence, disrupt and destabilise adversaries.
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By John Nosta
Source: Alexa/Pixabay
Axios AM Special Report: Living history
The Washington Hilton ballroom emptied after last night’s scare. Photo: Tom Brenner/AP
Screenshot: 
canisgallicus 