That's like saying speed limit signs have really nothing to do with cars, they're trying to impose a ban on collision velocity. Which is true, but only speciously, as the rule exists only because motor vehicles made it so easy to go fast.
They don't have anything specifically to do with cars. They apply equally to motorcycles, trucks and anything else that could go that fast. Get pulled over in a tank or a hovercraft and try to tell the officer that you can't have been speeding because it isn't a car.
Should we like deepfakes any better if they're created by a nation state using pre-AI Hollywood production technology, or "by hand" with Photoshop etc.? If 3D printers get better so that anybody can 3D print masks you can wear to convincingly look like someone else and then record yourself on camera, would you expect a different set of rules for that or are we talking about the same kind of problem?
You missed the analogy, so I'll spell it out: before we had cars[1], we couldn't go fast on roads, and there were no speed limit signs. Before we had AI, we couldn't deceive people with easy fakes, and so there was no need to regulate it. Now we do, and there is, and YouTube did.
Trying to characterize this as not related to AI just isn't adding to the discussion. Clearly it is a response to the emergence of AI fakes.
Trying to shovel in "and all of the other stuff" breaks the analogy though. Misinformation isn't new. Image gen is hardly the first time you could create a fictional depiction of something. It's not even the first time you could do it with commonly available tools. It's just the moral panic du jour.
YouTube did this because the EU passed a law about it. The EU passed a law about it because of the moral panic, not because the abstract concept of deception was only recently invented.
It's like having cars already, and speed limits, and then someone invents an electric car that can accelerate from 0 to 200 MPH in 5 seconds, so the government passes a new law with some arbitrary registration requirements to satisfy Something Must Be Done.
