I didn't know it had a name. Thanks!

While your point that sometimes people just have AI image associated traits is very salient, I worry you might not be considering the lengths these things will be used and why online discourse (in my worried opinion) is utterly fucked: The past ain't safe either.

For now we still have archive.org but without a third party/external source validating that old content...you can't be sure it's actually old content.

It's trivial to get LLMs to get image gen prompts done to "spice up those old news posts" at best (without remembering to tag the article edited/updated or bypassing that flag entirely)...and utterly fuck the very foundation of shared and accepted past reality not just presently but to anyone using the internet itself to look through the lens of the past at worst.

AI image generators have been around for a fairly long time. I remember deepfake discussion from about a decade ago. Not saying the image in discussion is though. I remember Alex Jones making conspiracy theories that revolved around Bush and lossy video compression artifacts too.

That's the real fear of AI. Not that it's stealing art jobs or whatever. But that all it takes is for a politician or business man to claim something is AI, no matter how corroborated it is and throw the whole investigation for a loop. It's not a thing now, because no one knows about advanced AI (except for internet bubbles) and it's still thought that you can easily differentiate images, but imagine even 5 years from, or 10.

In AI-generated sound you can see it in the waveform, it has less random noise altogether and it seems like a huge, well, wave. I wonder if sth similar is true for images.