I think you're veering too far into politics on what was originally not a very political OP/thread, but I'll indulge you a tiny bit and also try to bring the thread back to the original theme.

You said a lot of words that I basically boil down to a thesis of, the value of "truth" is being diluted in real-time across our society (with flood-the-zone kinds of strategies), and there are powerful vested interested who benefit from such a dilution. When I say powerful interests, I don't meant to imply Illuminati and Freemasons and massive conspiracies -- Trump is just some angry senile fool with a nuclear football, who as you said has learned to reflexively use "AI" as the new "fake news" retort to information he doesn't like / wishes weren't true. But corporations also benefit.

Google benefited tremendously from inserting itself into everyone's search habits, and squeezed some (a lot of) ad money out of being your gatekeeper to information. The new crop of AI companies (and Google and Meta and the old generation too) want to do the same thing again, but this time there's a twist -- whereas before the search+ads business could spam you with low-quality results (in proto-form, starting as the popup ads of yesteryear), but it didn't necessarily directly try to attack your view of "truth". In the future, you may search for a product you want to buy, and instead of serving you ads related to that product, you may be served disinformation to sway your view of what is "true".

And sure negative advertising always existed (one company bad-mouthing another competitor's products), but those things took time and effort/resources, and also once upon a time we had such things as truth-in-advertising laws and libel laws but those concepts seem quaint and unlikely to be enforced/supported by this administration in the US. What AI enables is "zero marginal cost" scaling of disinformation and reality distortion, and in a world where "truth" erodes, instead of there being a market incentive for someone to profit off of being more truth-y than other market participants, on the contrary I would except that the oligopolistic world we live in would conclude that devaluaing truth is more profitable for all parties (a sort of implicit collusion or cartel-like effect, with companies controlling the flow of truth, like OPEC controlling their flow of oil).