As has been pointed ad nauseam by now, no one's suggesting that AI unlocks the ability to doctor images; they're suggesting that it makes it trivially easy for anyone, no matter how unskilled, to do so.
I really find this constant back and forth exhausting. It's always the same conversation: '(gen)AI makes it easy to create lots of fake news and disinformation etc.' --> 'but we've always been able to do that. have you not guys not heard of photoshop?' --> 'yes, but not on this scale this quickly. can you not see the difference?'
Anyway, my original point was simply to say that a lot of people have (rightly or wrongly) indeed taken photographic evidence seriously, even in the age of photographic manipulation (which as you point out, pretty much coincides with the age of photography itself).
I really find this constant back and forth exhausting. It's always the same conversation: '(gen)AI makes it easy to create lots of fake news and disinformation etc.' --> 'but we've always been able to do that. have you not guys not heard of photoshop?' --> 'yes, but not on this scale this quickly. can you not see the difference?'
Anyway, my original point was simply to say that a lot of people have (rightly or wrongly) indeed taken photographic evidence seriously, even in the age of photographic manipulation (which as you point out, pretty much coincides with the age of photography itself).