I agree that that's concerning, but the same can be said of any of the other things that made this attack on public perception at scale relatively easy: Reddit, the World Wide Web, the Internet, you name it. AI is the latest effectiveness multiplier for bad actors (be they malicious or negligent), but not the first and probably not the last.

Put simply, I don't blame the hammer for being used to build a gallows, even if it's a really really fast hammer.

Exactly. The “AI” part of the equation is massively important because although a human could be equally disingenuous and wrongly influence someone else’s views/behavior, the human cannot spawn a million instances of themselves and set them all to work 24/7 at this for a year