People have been murdering since the beginning of time, but machine guns make it easy to murder a lot of people very fast. So we don’t just have laws against murder, but we have laws restricting access to machine guns.
AI tools make it possible to spread misinformation and disinformation much faster, because you can produce a high quantity of it really quickly. Just like how a machine gun shoots a lot of bullets really quickly. It’s not a fundamentally different type of thing, just a new scale / speed.