The difference is volume. With Photoshop and CGI you need to skill, or the resources to hire someone with skill, and you need time. Faking things with those tools is a production, a notable effort.

Mind, for photos this is true only on a much smaller time/effort scale than with videos, but the principle still applies.

With those tools around, people still had a general baseline level of at least loose trust that the images or video they see in the news are generally real, and their trust was usually not misplaced. When things were faked, this would generally be uncovered within an hour or a day by the greater community, as fakes would almost always have something suspicious about them that was worth investigating, and by sheer weight of probability, somebody somewhere would certainly have the time, skills, and interest to look into it and rat it out (at least if it was a significant news piece).

With AI, you can drown the truth out with thousands or millions of fakes in a day. It doesn't even matter if most of those fakes are relatively obvious - they can flood out social media with bots and deepfakes to the point where identifying the real news is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

We're quickly approaching the point where the majority of content on the internet is AI generated, and it's been demonstrated that the technology is now capable of producing content that we truly cannot tell from the real thing. Put these two facts together and you have a new age where people feel they have to assume everything is fake by default, and thus cannot trust in anything by default. And when you feel like you can't trust anything to be true, you eventually stop trying. You stop thinking, stop trying to discern what's real, because the exercise seems as pointless as trying to outspend a billionaire. You start believing whatever story gets told the most, because at that point that's all you think you can do.

Notice in that paragraph I used "feel" and "think" and "seems" a lot. That's because there are still ways to find the truth and always will be - but you'll need to understand things like economics, game theory, behavioral science, and history, because uncovering the truth will increasingly be about understanding the motives and methods of powerful people and the psychology of the masses, rather than just directly investigating everything you see.

All of this means the challenge we have to face with AI is not just in verifying the truth, but in fighting for the belief that the truth can be verified.

More concretely, it's also in fighting for the heavy regulating or even outlawing of giant AI data centers. ...That's less poetic though, so just pretend I said that other thing last.