I would counter with, “When any political faction (lib / cons) treats its moral convictions as self-evident global truths, and sympathetic media outlets and so called journalists amplify that certainty, our democratic discourse erodes at a rate far greater than anything AI could do.”

Is it possible to develop a camera that takes pictures in a special format that records an encrypted signature, some kind ledger technology for images?

The idea is authenticity of images could be challenged. If in doubt, the original photographer or source can provide verification - automated or otherwise, that only superficial X, Y, or Z edits have been made such as lighting or contrast changes.

Copies of the images would contain this ledger or a link. In the future maybe photos without this technology are never to be trusted as a source, or perhaps disallowed on certain platforms.

So it's inverted from "we must detect fake" to "we must detect authenticity." The latter being easier to control.

I mean, nice things are under threat. There's no escaping it. If technology got us into this mess, technology can dig us out.

I thought democracy was doomed not long after I first learned about it as I had already seen how 'well' people check that their beliefs match with reality. I thought I was wrong (partly to keep my sanity), that there must be some system that keeps it stable. Nowadays it is clear I was wrong - the clown show of current global democracy is nothing like what I imagined. I thought it was going to be smart, greedy leaders with complex lies that are hard to check, but instead, people are being robbed and the processes keeping them alive and fed are being destroyed all in the open, there are mostly no complex lies or smart leaders involved.

It's hard to blame AI for something that was obvious three decades ago.

Inequality is wearing down Democracy. Money votes, and money is being concentrated in just a few hands.

AI is just one of the means to lie to citizens, but way before AI existed, when power and money concentrates in a few hands, democracy and representation is at risk.

Redistribute wealth, and corruption and manipulation will shrink at the same pace that inequality. It happened before, it will happen again.

current thing bad

Neural networks are basically leveling political/media playing field down, to the level of the worst of the available candidates. So if there is a regular middle ground typical politician and a morally corrupt one financed by the neighboring fascist regime, then normally a regular politician will advertise on the basis that he is a better human and better professional. Now in the advent of generated fake content, his opponent (or sponsors/fans of him) will flood the network with lies and misinformation pulling that regular politician in the minds of the voters down to his own morally corrupt populist level. At the same time that regular politician can't really respond, because a) he can't really engage in spreading obvious lies since it is contrary to his image, b) creating positive lies would never work.

Basically since only negative lies work on general population, and positive lies are impossible, then negative lies will be generated about everyone above the currently shittiest level of politicians in a race. And neural nets are an x100 power and speed amplifier for this.