The slow collapse of critical thinking in OSINT due to AI

OSINT used to be a thinking game. Now it’s becoming a trusting game and that should terrify you. I’ve seen it firsthand, analysts running solid investigations, then slowly shifting more and more of the thinking to GenAI tools. At first, it’s small. You use ChatGPT to summarise a document or translate a foreign post. Then it’s helping draft your reports. Then it’s generating leads. And eventually, you’re not thinking as critically as you used to. You’re verifying less, questioning less, relying more. We tell ourselves we’re “working smarter.” But somewhere along the way, we stop noticing how much of the actual thinking is being offloaded. This isn’t a rant against AI. I use it daily, ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Gemini. They’re in my workflow like everyone else’s. But the tradecraft is slipping. Analysts are skipping the hard parts. They’re trusting GenAI to do the heavy cognitive lifting, and it’s changing how we operate at a foundational level. When OSINT becomes too easy ... Read full article.