AI companies love to hype up how AI will provide a great benefit to the economy and transform intellectual labor, but I hardly see any discussion about how much damage it will cause to the economy when you can no longer trust that you're on a video call with an actual person. Maybe the person you're interviewing is actually an AI impersonating someone, or maybe they never existed in the first place. Information found online will also no longer be trustable, footage of some incident somewhere may have been entirely fabricated by AI, and we already experience misleading articles today.

Money will have to be wasted on unnecessary flights to see stuff or meet people in-person instead of video, and the availability of actual information will become more and more limited as the sea of online information gets polluted with crap. It may never be possible to calculate the full extent of the damage in monetary value.

Partially agree.
However, this problem has existed with scam e-mails since the 90s.

For me the solution is in signed e-mails and signed documents. If the person invites me to a online meeting with a signed e-mail, I trust that person that it's really them.

Same for footage of wars, etc. The journalist taking it basically signs the videos and verifies it's authenticity. It is AI generated, then we would loose trust in that person and wouldn't use their material anymore.