I regularly take photos of text etc because I am not going to remember it. If a photo of a config password is AI fucked into showing the wrong digits, there’s a real problem.

That’s what photos used to be good for. They don’t fudge stuff like our brains.

What about and white photos though?

Their representation was consistent for one thing. For another it was well known that a) the world isn't black and white and b) b&w is just the tech we have right now. For a third thing, once color came out, black and white was still popular because it was a known art form that exposed characteristics of a scene which a color photograph might miss. So it was fudging images in a way that was predictable.

Compare this to AI/ML-manipulated photos that aren't labelled as such. In this case we no longer know if it's our brain fudging a picture or our camera, so we are starting to lose an arbiter of truth.

Side-rant but it'll be weird when this makes it into high-end cameras that save RAW images. Will RAW still be "raw?" I don't know enough to say.

Black and white photos are just missing information - specifically color. No new made up information is introduced.