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.

> people who outsource their thinking to LLMs.

OSINT I immagine would be kind of useless to analize with LLMs because the kind of information you're interested in is very new so not enough sources for the LLMs to regurgitate.

As an example -- I read some defence articles about Romania operating in the future 70 F-16 and it immediately caught my eye because I was expecting in the 40s range. Apparently the Nerherlands will leave those 18 F-16s to Romania -- but I'm not that curious to dig into enough -- I was expecting those would go to Ukraine.

So just for fun I asked the question -- to Gemini 2.5 and Chat gpt -- "How many F-16s will Romania eventually operate" -- they all regurgitated the 40s number. I explicitly asked Gemini about the 18 F-16s from the Nerherlands and it kept its number estimate, saying those are for training purposes.

Only after I explicitly explained it my own knowledge did Gemini google it and confirm it.

Or I asked about the tethered FPVs in Ukraine and it told me those have very little impact. Only after I explicitly mentioned the recent russian successful Kursk counter-offensive did it acknowledge them.