This is the real problem, I suspect. People will tend to favour things that support their existing biases (this includes me!) and now we have a firehose of crap to help us feel better about our views instead of challenging ourselves.
And it scares me just as much that the likely "someone has to do something about this" that surely will come. There's thoughts floating around like Originator Profile & Content Authenticity, which seems like voluntarily ways to start letting sites vouch for their content, and that seems ok...
https://github.com/w3c/tpac2024-breakouts/issues/70 https://github.com/w3c/tpac2024-breakouts/issues/90
..but it feels like there is a rapidly growing angst about mis and disinformation and that eventually some nations are going to start demanding truth, and only truth, online, and it feels implausible except by letting only very few speak at all.
It also bothers me that HN seems to be sweeping these issues with AI under the rug. It feels like many of these deepfake articles almost immediately get flagged. Yesterday the article on AI generated image of Trump in blue-jeans walking through flood water being widely shared for flagged quite quickly too. Now this? This is so what the current moment of technology & it's role in society is, right here, and malfeasants projecting their petty narrow view via suppression seem to be winning the day already. https://futurism.com/the-byte/donald-trump-hurricane-ai
You won't know when we've crossed the precipice and it's no longer detectable. By now it should be clear that video/audio evidence without some other form of provenance is untrustworthy.
If I write here
"I love yellow snow" - Barack H. Obama
You don't look for signs of manipulation, you just wouldn't trust it at all without corroboration, I can type anything I like.