Eli SaslowJun 17, 2026 – 10.29amThe emails began to arrive on a Sunday morning, as the worst ones often did. Hany Farid opened the first message at his home in the hills above Berkeley, California, and found a link to a viral video purporting to show a US-made missile hitting an elementary school in Iran, where more than 150 people had been killed, most of them children. “Is this an internet hoax or an international war crime?” one note read. “We’re trying to verify what’s real.”Farid grabbed a pencil and a notepad, leaned into his computer and watched. He saw blue sky, telephone wires and a few palm trees swaying in the wind. And then a missile streaked across the screen, clear and unmistakable even at 800 km/h. It looked like a scene from a video game. In the past few days, Farid had reviewed dozens of convincing artificial intelligence-generated videos of fake bombings, fake plane crashes, fake fires and fake executions. His instinct was to be sceptical. He was nearly certain the video was another fake.Subscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe.Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? Fetching latest articles