The slow collapse of critical thinking in OSINT due to AI

It's not? Why not? It's a "wake-up call", it's a "warning shot", but heaven forbid it's a rant against AI.

To me it's like someone listing off deaths from fentanyl, how it's destroyed families, ruined lives, but then tossing in a disclaimer that "this isn't a rant against fentanyl". In my view, the ways that people use and are drawn into AI usage has all the hallmarks of a spiral into drug addiction. There may be safe ways to use drugs but "distribute them for free to everyone on the internet" is not among them.

I think my biggest concern with AI is its biggest proponents have the least wisdom imaginable. I'm deeply concerned that our technocrats are running full speed at AGI with like zero plan for what happens if it "disrupts" 50% of jobs in a shockingly short period of time, or worse outcomes (theres some evidence the new tariff policies were generated with LLMs.. its probably already making policy. But it could be worse. What happens when bad actors start using these things to intentionally gaslight the population?)

But I actually think AI (not AGI) as an assistant can be helpful.

At individual perspective - AI is useful as a helper to achieve your generative tasks. I'd argue against analytic tasks, but YMMV.

At the societal perspective, e.g. you as individual can not trus anything the society has produced, because it's likely some AI generated bullshit.

Some time ago, if you were not trusting a source, you could build your understanding by evaluating a plurality of sources and perspectives and get to the answer in a statistical manner. Now every possible argument can be stretched in any possible dimension and your ability to build a conclusion has been ripped away.

A few thousand years of pre-LLM primary sources remain available for evaluation by humans and LLMs.

Every work had multiple versions. All versions were different. Some versions were diametrically opposed to others.

Have a look at Bible scholarship to see just _how_ divergent texts can become by nothing more than scribe errors.