The slow collapse of critical thinking in OSINT due to AI

> Participants weren’t lazy. They were experienced professionals.

Assuming these professionals were great critical thinkers until the AI came along and changed that is a big stretch.

In my experience, the people who outsource their thinking to LLMs are the same people who outsourced their thinking to podcasts, news articles, Reddit posts, Twitter rants, TikTok videos, and other such sources. LLMs just came along and offered them opinions on demand that they could confidently repeat.

> The scary part is that many users still believed they were thinking critically, because GenAI made them feel smart

I don’t see much difference between this and someone who devours TikTok videos on a subject until they feel like an expert. Same pattern, different sources. The people who outsource their thinking and collect opinions they want to hear just have an easier way to skip straight to the conclusions they want now.

Yeah it's similar to how Facebook is blamed for social malaise. Or how alcohol was blamed before that.

It's always more comfortable for people to blame the thing rather than the person.

I like the facebook comparison, but the difference is you don't have to use facebook to make money and survive. When the thing is a giant noisemaker crapping out trash that screws up everyone else's work (and thus their livelihood), it becomes a lot more than just some nuisance you can brush away.