I'd argue that for a profession that has existed for quite some time, "since chatGPT appeared" isn't in any way "slow"

> What Dies When Tradecraft Goes Passive?

Eventually, Brazil (1985) happens, to the detriment of Archibald [B]uttle, where everyone gives unquestionable trust to a flawed system.

Aka, i have no problem being explicitly anti AI as a bad idea to begin with. This is what I think, that it is a foolish project from the get go.

Techne is the Greek word for HAND.

Most cybersecurity is just a smoke show anyways, presentation matters more than content. AI is just good at security theather as humans are.

OSINT is a symptom of it. When GPT-2 came along, I was worried that at some point the internet will get spammed with AI-crap. Boy, was I naive... I see this incredibly frequently and I get a ton of hate for saying this (including here on HN): LLMs and AI in general is a perfect demonstration of a shiny-new-toy. What people fail to acknowledge is that the so called "reasoning" is nothing more then predicting the most likely next token, which works reasonably well for basic one-off tasks. And I have used LLMs in that way - "give me the ISO 3166-1 of the following 20 countries:". That works. But as soon as you throw something more complex and start analyzing the results(which look reasonable at first glance), the picture becomes very different. "Oh just use RAGs, are you dumb?", I hear you say. Yeah?

class ParsedAddress(BaseModel):

    street: str | None

    postcode: str | None

    city: str | None

    province: str | None

    country_iso2: str | None

Response:

{

  "street": "Boulevard",

  "postcode": 12345,

  "city": "Cannot be accurately determined from the input",

  "province": "MY and NY are both possible in the provided address",

  "country_iso2": "US"

}

Sure, I can spend 2 days trying out different models and tweaking the prompts and see which one gets it, but I have 33 billion other addresses and a finite amount of time.

The issue occurs in OSINT as well: A well structured answer lures people into a mental trap. Anthropomorphism is something humans have fallen for since the dawn of mankind and is doing so yet again with AI. The thought that you have someone intelligent nearby with god-like abilities can be comforting but... Um... LLMs don't work like that.

Am I the only one to have to search for what OSINT was an acronym for?

It's true, so often chatgpt has to apologize because it was wrong. lol

This article seems a bit weird because it doesn't talk about whether the quality of the analysis went up or down afterwards.

To pick an extreme example, programmers using a strongly typed language might not bother manually checking for potential type errors in their code and leave it to the type checker to catch them. If the type checker turns out to be buggy then their code may fail in production due to their sloppiness. However, we expect the code to eventually be free of type errors to a superhuman extent because they are using a tool that is strong to cover their personal weaknesses.

AI isn't as provably correct as type checkers, but they're pretty good at critical thinking (superhuman compared to the average HN argument) and human analysts must also routinely leave a trail of mistakes in their wake. The real question is what influence the AI has on the quality and I don't see why the assumption is that it is negative. It might well be; but the article doesn't seem to go into that in any depth.

The entire article has AI gen content into the mix. But I get it. Yes people are going to get obliterated if they only rely on AI for answers.

> This isn’t a rant against AI. I use it daily

It is, but it adds disingenuous apologetic.

Not wishing to pick on this particular author, or even this particular topic, but it follows a clear pattern that you can find everywhere in tech journalism:

  Some really bad thing X is happening. Everyone knows X is happening.
  There is evidence X is happening, But I am *not* arguing against X
  because that would brand me a Luddite/outsider/naysayer.... and we
  all know a LOT of money and influence (including my own salary)
  rests on nobody talking about X.

Practically every article on the negative effects of smartphones or social media printed in the past 20 years starts with the same chirpy disavowal of the authors actual message. Something like;

"Smartphones and social media are an essential part of modern life today... but"

That always sounds like those people who say "I'm not a racist, but..."

Sure, we get it, there's a lot of money and powerful people riding on "AI". Why water down your message of genuine concern?