Aff evidence is overblown moral panic

We have argued that concerns over the effects of generative AI on the information landscape—and, in particular, the spread of misinformation—are overblown. These concerns are part of an old and broad family of moral panics surrounding new technologies (Jungherr & Schroeder, 2021b; Orben, 2020; Simon & Camargo, 2021). When it comes to new information technologies, such panics might be based on the mistaken assumption that people are gullible, driven in part by the third-person effect (Altay & Acerbi, 2023; Mercier, 2020).

These concerns also tend to overlook the fact that we already owe our current information environment to a complex web of institutions that has allowed the media to provide broadly accurate information, and for the public, in turn, to trust much of the information communicated by the media. These institutions have already evolved to accommodate new media, such as film and photography (Habgood-Cote, 2023; Jurgenson, 2019), even though it has always been possible to manipulate these media. Moreover, it’s far from clear that the more technologically complex forms of manipulation are the most efficient: nowadays, journalists and fact checkers struggle not so much with deepfakes but with visuals taken out of context or with crude manipulations, such as cropping of images or so-called “cheapfakes” (Brennen et al., 2020; Kapoor & Narayanan, 2023; Paris & Donovan, 2019; Weikmann & Lecheler, 2023).