alt Hacker News> “AI makes it easier”, was it hard to stumble across out-of-context clips and photoshops that worked well enough to create divisiveness?
Yes. And I think this is what most tech-literate people fail to understand. The issue is scale.
It takes a lot of effort to find the right clip, cut it to remove its context, and even more effort to doctor a clip. Yes, you're still facing Brandolini's law[1], you can see that with the amount of effort Captain Disillusion[2] put in his videos to debunk crap.
But AI makes it 100× times worse. First, generating a convincing entirely video only takes a little bit of prompting, and waiting, no skill is required. Second, you can do that on a massive scale. You can easily make 2 AI videos a day. If you want to doctor videos "the old way", you'll need a team of VFX artists to do it at this scale.
I genuinely think that tech-literate folks, like myself and other hackernews posters, don't understand that significantly lowering the barrier to entry to X doesn't make X equivalent to what it was before. Scale changes everything.