Because the venn diagram of “people who would maliciously do something like this” and “people with good enough photoshop skills to make it look realistic” were nearly two separate circles. AI has added a third “people with access to AI image generators” circle, and it has a LOT of overlap with the second group simply because it is so large.

The thing is you actually need some skill to do it in Photoshop, but now every dumb fuck who knows how to read can do shit like this.

It doesn’t require skill anymore. AI has enabled children with the ability to pretend they have a skill, and to use it to fool people for fun.

These are more realistic and far far easier to make.

It took skill to do this before. Hardly anyone with that level of skill and time would do this. Now the dumb idiots have access to that skillset because of AI doing all the work for them.