Deepfakes have the potential to totally destroy the average person’s already tenuous connection with reality outside of their immediate vicinity.
Some will be fooled by an endless stream of fakes and others will never believe anything again.
Politicians will dismiss footage of them doing or saying something bad as fake. And many times, they’ll be telling the truth.
We are already living in a post-fact world to some extent, but buckle up, because it’s about to get a lot worse.
Edit: I should probably say for full transparency that I am strongly FOR watermarks for AI imagery
Imagine for example, that in the future and with improved tech, manufacturer of knifes were to embed a gps chip in all knifes sold because it might be used for dangerous things.
The worse in all of that being that the big tech does it based on their own "moral" compass and not based on a legal requirement.
Regarding the watermark, that is also applying to generated text in theory, imagine that you ask ai to refactor a job application letter or a letter to your landlord, and that Google will snitch you with watermark that you used AI for that.
I don't know if that's the argument you're trying to make, but I think it's worth considering