If you excise the concern about "did a government make this tech secretly for their own purposes," do the problems and possibilities it raises actually differ if it emerged from "pure research" or a conspiracy?
I don't believe anyone needed a conspiracy to try to make it impossible to tell what's real or fake, people have been trying to use technology to do that for decades (if not centuries) all on their own.
Yeah, the "government conspiracy" part is the least believable one but the resulting effects on society are the same. Within days of this technology showing up, people were already making fake AI generated recordings of politicians talking gleefully about their wonderful experiences in Epstein's island. How long is it gonna take for some politician to want to regulate this stuff? How would they do it? Mandatory identity verification is plausible.
In my country politicians are talking about regulating social media and the internet due to "fake news". They even created a government propaganda agency to "combat misinformation online", basically people paid to defend the government against information warfare. It's way too real.
Exactly, conspiracies ignore opportunists simply existing. People reacting to new information that favors them. It ignores that there are different opportunitists for every possible outcome. Every possible administration, every possible industry leveraged, every possible geopolitical outcome.
Conspiracies rely on coordination, and a counterproductive view that makes no difference in how we got to the outcome.
I don't believe anyone needed a conspiracy to try to make it impossible to tell what's real or fake, people have been trying to use technology to do that for decades (if not centuries) all on their own.