> do we all join our own conspiracy communities?
No, we apply appropriate skepticism by considering context, history, motivations and prior knowledge of both the source and the persons or entities involved. The uncomfortable reality that no news sources were ever worthy of our full trust isn't new or recent since the rise of AI or even digital editing. So, to me, it's a net positive that at least now many more people are aware of it.
AI-generated media elements as well as the slightly more labor-intensive manual digital manipulation before AI (eg Photoshop) are both almost quaintly mild because at least there are digital artifacts which can be fairly easily detected, disproven or otherwise countered. Whereas the far more subtle but no less deceptive techniques like changing the order of interview questions in editing or selectively excerpting answers are essentially indetectable and have been widely used to skew reporting at mainstream national news outlets since at least the 1970s.
About 20 years ago I was professionally involved behind-the-scenes with the creation of mainstream news content at a national level. Seeing how the sausage was made was pretty shocking. Subtle systemic bias was constant and impacted almost everything in ways it would be hard for non-insiders to detect (like motivated editorial curation or pre-aligned source selection). Blatantly overt bias was slightly less common but hardly infrequent. Seeing it happen first-hand disabused me of the notion there were ever "reliable sources of record" which could be trusted. While it's true the better outlets would tend to be mostly correct and mostly complete on many topics, even the very best were still heavily impacted by internal and external partisan influences - and, of course, bias tended to be exerted on the things that mattered.