> the harm in that case is the embarrassment and you can achieve the same results in 10 minutes with any image editing software

The harm is not the "embarrassment" of seeing someone in the likeness of yourself (or your son, your friend, your partner, etc) doing something shameful. The harm is the fact that people are very likely to believe it is true and it's not a fake obviously edited photo or video.

You can disagree on the seriousness of the harm or risk or danger or whatever but I think the distinction between an obviously silly/embarrassing fake (a puppet, papier mache, badly done photoshop picture) and a realistic convincing deepfake video is pretty obvious. They aren't even in the same ballpark.

> IMO most of the harm from AI is likely to come from people not believing things that are real, and dismissing reality with “that’s just a deepfake”.

This is also a really good point and I agree it's a danger.

Further to this point, there is plenty of collected evidence of the harms this kind of image-based abuse, of both real (sometimes coerced or often surreptitiously taken) and faked images:

See, for instance, this study of "sextortion" in minors:

https://respect.international/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Sex...