I never claimed that the current software didn’t use machine learning

This is not AI.

This is your straight statement, and your only argument was saying it was done before AI was used in it. That's a poor argument. That's like arguing that self driving isn't AI because remote control car piloting existed.

Automated image manipulation vs having 100s of hours in Photoshop. That's AI vs what came before. Inputting a source file and getting a manipulated file after some amount of time, vs hours of meticulous work trying to get minor details right.

If we want to compare oldschool manipulation vs AI Manipulation, then yes, fakes now are on par with the insane skill of some image doctoring artists - you're just looking for different things - but it's at an exponentially lower cost than hiring a professional. Compare AI to itself, though? It's night and day. Early AI manipulation was atrocious. And modern AI manipulation is only going to get better. That is all due to breakthroughs in AI. imagine what the hell will happen when Sora becomes usable by anyone.

Machine learning has taken an originally hard thing to do and made it cheap and easy. Now, any schmuck can pump out doctored footage in an afternoon. That's why the AI porn is big- you can pay dirt cheap and give the model photos of any random woman and it'll make porn of them - and that fact has turned it into a much more viable business model than before, that's currently creating massive amounts of non consensual porn fakes- exponentially more than before.