What damage are you talking about?
I'm not sure I understand why it matters that there is no real person there if you can't actually tell the difference. You're just demonstrating that you don't actually need a human for whatever it is you're doing.
The damage is to the trust we have in our communication media. The conclusion here is that every person is trivial to impersonate; that's the damage.
Also it was already possible for someone to impersonate your mother via text or similar, and even easier to pull off.
If you got a suspicious text, the logical thing is to call up the person who sent it and try to verify it. AI impersonation makes that much harder.
Instead what we have now with AI is people exchanging merely the tokens and being contented with the symbol in-and-of itself, as something valuable in its own right, with no need for an actual candidate or physical product underlying the symbol.
There is a clip by McLuhan I can't be assed to find right now where he says eventually people will stop deriving pleasure from the products themselves and instead derive the feelings of (projected) accomplishment and pleasure from viewing advertisements about the product. The product itself becomes obsolete, for all you actually need to evoke the desired response is the advertisement, or the symbol.
A hiring manager interviewing an AI and offering it a job is like buying the advertisement you just watched, and.... that's it. No more, the transaction is complete.
Hmm, this guy may have been on to something
>Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.
--The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962
Not GP, but there's a lot of damage that can be done with impersonation.
However, the increase in fake videos that are difficult to tell from real is indeed a potential issue. But the fact that misinformation today is already so prevalent is evidence that better video doesn't make it any worse than it already is imho.
We're in deep shit.
