i think its more about the ease.

you used to need a team, then a qualified professional, now any moron can tell a machine to do it.

That all comes up in the article. The core idea the author is getting at is the general ease of fabricated situations is coming in a new way that previously hasn't been a couple clicks for the average user. Think less about political turmoil (propaganda has existed as long as there as been politics) and more about how your Karen aunt can add a worm to their Google review for spaghetti. Most people won't learn Photoshop, most people can click a few buttons.

I think it's still important to consider the tomorrow we're being thrust into even if we could do this on a smaller scale yesterday.

Yeah, clearly the author doesn’t know about Stalin

It's still rather easy to identify AI generated pictures, especially of people. There's still way to go untill we get video that's sufficiently good that it's difficult to tell it's fake. It's absolutely going to be a problem sooner or later but I doubt we're anywhere near.

Also, the one benefit this all comes with is the plausible deniability when you're accused of something even if it really was you. Say you have nudes leak online for example. You can just say they're not real and it would be really difficult to prove otherwise.

That's a very good point! I never thought about the power of removing things. Would be nice to see it save photos that are out of focus, in a bad perspective or with a finger over half of the selfie.

This feature already exists, it's called Magic Eraser and it's on most Pixel phones. I feel this is something different and needs to be considered differently.

Testimony has always existed in the court room, it hasn't gone away. The relative difficulty of believable photo manipulation to add in new subjects, has up until now been out of reach for the average person so generally speaking it's been a nice enhancement of authenticity to testimony.

I think chain of custody will be more important than eyewitness testimony in the future. In the case of CCTV or body cam footage, it will be a combination of the footage being digitally signed by the recording device, and being able to prove the footage could not have been tampered with along the way.

So, a record of where and when the footage was recorded, when it was transferred from the device, where it was held after this, and that the storage location was also secure.

No thanks.