> So why didn't this "data collapse" happen then? I'm not saying it's impossible, but people in this comment thread are acting like there's some hard barrier in

> So why didn't this "data collapse" happen then? I'm not saying it's impossible, but people in this comment thread are acting like there's some hard barrier in technological accessibility, before which everything is good and trustworthy, and after which there's apocalyptic consequences, permanent decay of trust, erasure of history, etc. Is it a barrier or a sliding scale? What makes people so confident that it's this exact development that will finally tip the scales for good? I think people tend to get too focused on one narrow thing (e.g. this technology) and loose sight of the context. Some things going on now: 1. AI fakes will take the skill floor down "several orders of magnitude" more. 2. Trust in all kinds of institutions is declining, including the government and media (precisely the ones that were relied on to debunk and discredit fakes in the past). 3. More and more people are getting their information from social media. tl;dr: "data collapse" hasn't happened yet because, previously we had the institutional capacity to manage airbrushed fakes/photoshops/etc. As the technology gets cheaper, and the institutions get weaker, eventually they won't be able to keep up.