Another artificial intelligence technology called Generative Adversarial Networks makes it easy to fabricate faces, intricate cityscapes and anything else base on a sufficient number of photographs to “train” artificial neural networks — visually believable and utterly false.

All this will strain the concept that “seeing is believing.”

In the human rights realm, that means those hoping to deceive, conceal or confuse now have important new tools that go well beyond Photoshop. We’ve learned how quickly false claims can spread, given what legal scholars Robert Chesney and Danielle Citron describe as “a combination of social media ubiquity and virality, cognitive biases, filter bubbles, and group polarization.” As computer scientist Emilio Ferrara and his colleagues note, “The novel challenge brought by bots is the fact they can give the false impression that some piece of information, regardless of its accuracy, is highly popular and endorsed by many.”