[autoexec]

I'm inclined to disagree just because photoshop has had a measurable effect on the population being skeptical of photos which at one point were practically treated as the gold standard of evidence. It's still easy to find people who have fallen for photoshopped images, but it's also easy to find people expressing doubts and insisting they can "tell by the pixels". Sometimes even legitimate photos get accused of being photoshopped which seems healthy.

[komali2]

The other side of this is that ai tools are being treat like magic to the point that people are denying well documented events happened at all, such as the shooting of Charlie Kirk - conspiracies abound!

Also bizarrely a subsection of the population seems to be really into blatantly ai generated images, just hop onto Facebook and see for yourself. I wonder if it has something to do with whatever monkey brain things makes people download apps with a thumbnail of a guy shouting or watch videos that have a thumbnail of a face with its mouth open, since ai generated photos seem very centralized around a single face making a strange expression.

[somenameforme]

People of a profound initial bias will, in general, believe anything that supports that bias, and reject anything that challenges it, in both cases without any real consideration or thought whatsoever. So I don't think examples of individuals being "misled" by e.g. AI generated images or video, to extremes, is entirely realistic. Rather they were already at those extremes and will just eat up anything that appeals to those extremes.

To take a less politically charged example, imagine there is fake content 'proving' that the Moon landing is faked. Is that going to meaningfully sway people who don't have a major opinion one way or the other? Probably not, certainly not in meaningful numbers. And in general I think the truth does come out on most things. And when people find they have been misled, particularly if it was somebody they thought they could trust, it tends to result in a major rubber-banding in the opposite direction.