Exciting if you don't think about how tons of people are going to be out of work with no safety nets or how easily millions of people are going to be scammed or how easily it is going to be to be impersonate someone and frame them or etc etc etc
Let's say, for the sake of argument, AI could generate absolutely perfect invented videos of arbitrary people doing literally anything. The consequence will be that video will no longer be taken seriously as evidence for crimes. People will also quickly not trust video calls without an extreme level of verification (e.g. asking about recent irl interactions, etc.)
Yes some people will be scammed as they always have been, such as the recent Hong Kong financial deepfake. But no, millions of people will not keep falling for this. Just like the classic 419 advanced free fraud, it will hit a very small percentage of people.
OK, but I did like living in a universe where I could watch video news of something happening in another country and treat it as reasonably strong evidence of what is happening in the world. Now I basically have to rely on only my own eyes, which are limited to my immediate surroundings, and eyewitness accounts from people I trust who live in those places. In that sense, I feel like my ability to be informed about the world has regressed to pre-20th-century levels.
I predict that we will have blockchain integration of media crating devices such that any picture / film that is taken will be assigned a blockchain transaction ID that moment it is generated. We will only trust media with verifiable blockchain encryption that allows us to screen against any tampering from the source.
Video alone has never been considered evidence of a crime in a court of law (At least in the United States). A person needs to authenticate the evidence.
Think what it was like before the invention of the camera, and then after, this is a similar level of innovation. I'm sure a lot of people who wrote books were terrified by the prospect of moving pictures, but everything worked out and books still exist.
IMHO humanity will be fine, decades from now kids will be asking what it was like to live before "AI" like how we might ask an old person what it was like to live before television or electricity.
Consensus reality is already cracking up due to the internet, smartphones and social media. The Media theorist Marshall McLuhan had a lot to say about this well in advance, but nobody listened.
The more people AI displaces then the less customers they would have right? Wouldn't there be some equilibrium reached where it can no longer grow due to falling profits? Let's say they mostly sell B2B, who are those other businesses selling to if no one (generally speaking) has expendable income?
The last two claims always felt wrong to me, because they're assuming a society where these kinds of tools are easy to use and accessible to everyone, yet the society at large is completely oblivious to these tools and their capabilities. Arguably, you couldn't ever fully trust images before, people claimed something was photoshopped for decades now. Instead of something "looking realistic", trusting people and organizations will take its place - when, for example, the BBC posts a photograph, I'm inclined to trust it not because it looks real, but because it's the BBC.
