Your mention of Stalin is I think stronger as an argument that there’s been a significant change. Those fakes took lots of time by skilled humans and were notoriously obvious - what made them effective was the crushing political power preventing them from receiving critical analysis in public.

Similarly, while Photoshop made it easier it happened at a time where technical advances made the problem harder because everyone’s standards for photos went up dramatically, and so producing a realistic fake was still a slow process for a skilled worker.

Now, it’s increasingly available to everyone and that means that we’re going to see a lot more scams and hoaxes as people without artistic talent or willingness to invest time can make realistic fakes even for minor things. That availability is transformative enough to merit the concern we’ve been seeing here.

The glass half-full in me feels that the advantage to this is that in a few years the average person will know better than to trust anything that could be faked like that, instead of the old situation where someone who was willing to put in that effort could actually trick a lot of people.

I think that’s true, but it’s kind of like the trade offs during the pandemic where we knew it would eventually settle into a stable state but still wanted to reduce the harm getting there. We basically need some large fraction of the global population to level up in media literacy at all once.