The old fear of deepfakes was that "people wont be able to tell real from fake." That initial fear seems to have subsided and the new fear is "AI will allow malicious actors to manufacture so much believable content that truth as a concept will evaporate."
I think such a situation is impossible and almost even nonsensical. Reality itself is full of human agents lying, obscuring and misleading about their own internal processes. How could an organism like ourselves be "misled" by artifacts produced by devious beings?
It just seems to imagine that humans can be short-circuited by some malicious input and never adapt or change. It seems to me we have been bombarded by malicious inputs for 10000 generations, why are these new inputs so dangerous?
Because of scale? Tech is an insane force multiplier. Instead of deceiving ~100 people by talking to them face-to-face you can now deceive ~10k, 100k, maybe millions. The cost is also so low to allow pretty much anyone to engage in this behavior.
This was the reason why there was resistance against televising presidential debates for a long time. The belief was it's substantially easier to trick people through expressions than through words.
But that's just a description of what is possible with a fat channel. Why is the existence of a fat channel sufficient to eliminate truth? It's probably necessary, but sufficient? no way
Because it's in a manner that humans aren't used to. People lie, but they can't literally put lies directly in people's mouths. Just look at the election in the Phillipines, it's clear people aren't adapting. Or look at the last election in America-- the idea that people will adapt is not holding up
There are a lot of gullible persons. A lot of them use social media. Posting things is easy. Imagine a video telling people the cure to a worldwide virus is injecting bleach while also peddling conspiracies about the FDA .
I mean the last president won much of his fame not from political experience, but from media exposure largely in TV shows and news. Whether you like him or not, he's an argument that television opened a new dimension to the presidential race