I suspect that quite a lot of this caution is driven by Google and other large companies which want to slow everyone else down so they can win the new market on this tech. The remaining part of the caution appears to come from our neo-puritan era where there is a whole lot of pearl clutching over everything. Newsflash, humans are violent brutes, always have been.
You might be right in the second paragraph about the motivations for slowing this down. There clearly are reasons to be cautious here though, even if this isn't the real reason for the current caution.
Why should only the few have access to such a technology? Because some people will use it for naughty things? And that's what we are talking about here, about whether a minority should have permissioned access to a new technology, and particularly one that cannot directly actually cause physical harm. I can glean motivations surrounding all this from that observation alone.
Side note: if you're a materialist, you should believe that psychological harm is physical harm. It's obvious that being able to publish images of someone doing things they themselves find reprehensible could cause lots of trauma.
My point was that if there's only matter, then mental / psychological harm must be in some sense physical harm.
(FWIW I lean not-materialist myself, but it's a common perspective around here so I thought it was worth pointing out)
Your point about photography is also comparing apples and oranges. There are fundamental differences here down to scale and accessibility of techniques that means anyone will soon be able to deep fake anything instantly.
Fwiw, do I think this technology should be controlled by big tech? No way. Do I think this is Pandaora's box? Yes. If we don't reconcile the tricky tradeoffs between radical democratisation of this technology on the one hand vs heavy handed control on the other, we are in hot water. Tldr... it's complicated and it is not zero sum.
This isn't even a hypothetical but a reality celebrities already face to some extent.
I'd say the usage of the tech will stabilize, but it's also the case that we have dark days ahead of us.
Your discomfort is not enough reason to stop the free speech of everyone else. It never was, and never will be.
The most effective way to deal with the damage of deepfakes is to make them ubiquitous and accessible. The more familiar people are with the ability to create deepfake content, the more prepared they are to think critically and distrust it.
The average person already knows that still images aren't flawless evidence. The world didn't fall apart after the first release of Photoshop.
So far the most reliable tool for that was a human moderator. With the new era of generated images there is no way to tell. You will simply have to distrust every image you see on the web.
The more insulated a person is from the surrounding context of a video, the less leverage they have to determine its validity.
It's just like speech: the farther gossip spreads, the less trustworthy it becomes.
Also you seem to be affected by American sensibilities. If your AI decides to go full hiel in Germany you may find that the authorities have a lot of talk about with you.