I think the the real reason they’re dumping all this money into AI is because of exactly this strategy. AI is the only thing in the world that can give them plausible deniability about the validity of pictures and videos. They’re trying to drag things out as slowly as possible because they know it’s inevitable it’ll come out. They’re trying to stuff as much money as possible into AI so that it is as good as possible for when those videos do come out. At that point, they hope to be able to claim that the videos are fake.