Yes yes something something this is inevitable therefore the galaxy brained thing is to be completely fine with how it's applied in an unfettered capitalistic system. Also something something if you're against this technology wrecking careers, reputations, and sometimes lives you might be too emotional and against Materialism(tm). :very-intelligent:
If you're willing to concede that maybe even a majority of the images are real, why stay committed to the idea that some are AI generated? It'd simply be more practical to show 500 real images rather than show 1000 images where half are fake and to risk detection, just because of how difficult it would be to make any amount of fake images of sufficient quality.
I don't trust it by default either, which is why I choose to completely ignore the given context for the images and simply acknowledge what I can see. I see pictures of a number of people, mostly seeming to be the same ethnicity, they're in a room with a fairly boring background wearing dark clothes that don't fit, their heads are all rotated the same way. It's clearly facial recognition photos based off of those facts. What are they for? We don't know. Probably just standard ID photos. People being of the same ethnicity doesn't prove targeting either since they could be cherrypicked photos. That's enough to discredit it without even questioning the authenticity of the photos themselves and as a whole it is far more in line with standard propaganda tactics.
I mostly agree with the premise of all of that and was/is the way I dismiss it's purpose in the first place. I just ALSO think at least a non zero (fairly large) portion were doctored/generated too. It's not so much a commitment as it is a thing I was curious about and then saw with my own eyes. You can go and browse the top level directory on the website hosting the "leaks" by deleting the filename from the url. Regardless as you said it really doesn't matter for the purposes of denying their purpose to at least reasonably aware of the shit our government does people. While I agree just using larger photo sets with false representation is something our government would do or would find easier, I don't agree it's something a grifter with some access to a stolen archive of photos wouldn't do to scam money OUT of our government, who would eat it up because aligned interests/relative ease. As to why they needed say 2800 instead of I dunno, 1400? No idea, couldn't really be bothered to speculate on it but perhaps there was some reason to enlarge the dataset, financial or propaganda or overpromising a "leak" or who knows. Never underestimate the ineptitude of people who willingly refuse to analyze the world around them lest they become a communist.
The ability to train existing open models to a fairly decent capability has come a long way in the last few years though. As early as least year I was able to get pretty good results capable of fooling a lot of people I know IRL using nothing but a google compute instance with gpu and 25-50 images of either random or specific subjects depending on the purpose before I got too bored because despite being easy it IS time consuming, and continued with the main purpose of training anti-ai detection models as part of thing I did that I can't link to without doxxing myself. Nothing to consider myself any kind of authority of any kind on the matter though, just saying some models are a lot better than others, and depending on relative strengths of the model and how well it aligns with a purpose it's definitely at least as reasonable as "These are all normal images of eyes with teeth".
Edit: Just to add, a TON of the people tangentially related to/in the periphery of the PMC/"Think Tank"/"That other term for 'non political' organizations that exist solely to fuck with other countries for profit but pretend to be charities" circles are just straight grifters. It's a huge majority of them. They will sell/buy/fabricate anything if they can reasonably spin it as fuel for their home countries political war. Hell Zenz himself sold the idea of a genocide on moving the decimal place in a fucking table and implying some massive number of women were being sterilized instead of the real story of single digits (a similar percentage to the rest of the populace) getting reversible contraceptive proceedures (IUDs) and the public just ate that shit up and even when you bring it up it gets waved away.