Aside from the civil versus criminal distinction, it seems significant that this statute judges harm differently than libel laws. Libel/slander requires reputational damage to an individual, while this is about facilitating criminal/tortious conduct in general. That seems to cover some fairly significant non-libel cases, like knowingly creating a video for someone to use as an alibi.

I agree that it still seems like premature legislation, though. Even from the viewpoint of a random programmer, it's both overbroad (this covers any video editing, not just 'deepfakes' as commonly understood) and incomplete (what happens when no recognizable people are represented, but an edit is still used to facilitate criminal action?)

If doctored video becomes as believable as authentic video, it's going to be a major upheaval, returning us to a world where seeing isn't believing. Probably not completely; there will be an obvious market for hard-to-fake authentication, even in forms as simple as registering a video hash with a trusted source as soon as it's taken. But the departure from a world where a high-res video of an event is reliable proof is going to be a very big change, and I seriously doubt any law written today will productively adjust for it.