Forgive me on an initial reading, it is hard to have a nuanced discussion on this stuff without coming off like an uncaring caricature of one of two stereotypes, or look like you're attacking your interlocutor. When I'm writing these out, it's free association like I'm writing a diary entry, not as a critique of your well-reasoned and 100% accurate take.
Personal thoughts:
- we're already a year past the point where it was widely known you can generate whatever you want, and get it to a reasonable "real" threshold with less than a day worth of work.
- the impact is likely to be significantly muted, rather than an exponential increase upon, a 2020 baseline. professionals were capable of accomplishing this with a couple orders of magnitude more manual work for at least a decade.
- in general, we've suffered more societally from histrionics/over-reactions to being bombarded with the same messaging
- it thus should end up being _net good_, in that a skeptic has a 100% accurate argument for requiring more explanation than "wow look at this!"
- I expect that being able to justify / source / explain things will gain significant value relative to scaled up distributors giving out media someone else gave them without any review.
- something I've noticed the last couple years is people __hate__ looking stupid. __Hate__. They learn extremely quickly to refactor knowledge they think they have once confronted in public, even by the outgroup, as long as theyre a non-extremist.
After writing that out, I guess my tl;Dr as of this moment and mood, is there will be negligible negative effects, we already reached a nadir of unquestioned BS sometime between 2010 and 2024, and a baseline be _anyone_ can easily BS will lead to wide acceptance of skeptical reactions, even within ingroups.
God I hope I'm right.