On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
A new wave of hyper-realistic AI deepfake videos is spreading across social media, reigniting fears that the internet is entering a phase where visual proof can no longer be trusted. Over the past few days, multiple AI-generated clips — some involving public figures, others depicting ordinary people — have gone viral before being flagged or debunked. In many cases, viewers initially believed the footage was real, only realizing later that it had been artificially created. The incidents have triggered renewed concern among educators, employers, creators, and everyday users about how easily video can now be manipulated. What Sparked the Latest Panic The latest surge began after several short videos circulated on platforms like X, TikTok, and Instagram, showing people saying or doing things they never actually did. Unlike earlier deepfakes that were often low quality or clearly artificial, these clips featured realistic facial movement, natural speech patterns, and convincing l...