Agreed. My point was that trusting images ('seeing is believing') has always been at issue whilst we might imagine it is a new thing, the scale of the issue is

Agreed. My point was that trusting images ('seeing is believing') has always been at issue whilst we might imagine it is a new thing, the scale of the issue is different -- phenomenally so -- but it's not a category difference. Many people were convinced by the fairy hoaxes based on image manipulation in the early 20th Century (~1917). They fell for it hook-line-and-sinker, images made with ML weren't needed.