The slow collapse of critical thinking in OSINT due to AI

Posted by walterbell 4/3/2025

The slow collapse of critical thinking in OSINT due to AI(www.dutchosintguy.com)

446 points | 231 commentspage 5

nonrandomstring 4/3/2025|

> 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?

rini17 4/3/2025||

There were too many cheap accusations of hypocrisy "you say X is bad so why do you use it yourself". So everyone is now preempting it.

trinsic2 4/3/2025|||

I think this is a good point regardless of how much you have been down voted. I hope your not using this context to sub-communicate this issue isn't important. If not, It might have been better to put your last line at the top

nonrandomstring 4/4/2025||

The subject is deadly serious, and I only wish I could amplify it more. The abdication of reason and responsibility to machines is desperately dumb and no good will come of it.

Maybe what I'm getting at is this [0] poem of Taylor Mali. Somehow we all lost our nerve to challenge really, really bad things, wrapping up messages in tentative language. Sometimes that's a genuine attempt at balance, or honesty. But often these days I feel an author is trying too hard to distance themself from ... from themself.

It's a a silly bugbear, I know.

[0] https://taylormali.com/poems/totally-like-whatever-you-know/

Aeolun 4/4/2025||

> It is, but it adds disingenuous apologetic.

It’s not. It’s a rant against people and their laziness and gullibility.

smashah 4/4/2025||

At the end of the day it is people who are doing OSINT and their self/ai confidence is a reflection of their fallibility, just as being manipulated by intelligence operatives in their discord servers to be peer pressured into pushing a certain narrative. OSINT should be about uncovering objective truth in a sea full of lies in a storm of obfuscation through a tsunami of misinformation caused by an earthquake of disinformation. Now these OSINT people need to battle the siren song of clout (and being first).

I doubt anyone can do it perfectly every time, it requires a posthuman level of objectivity and high level of information quality that hardly ever exists.

FrankWilhoit 4/3/2025||

A crutch is one thing. A crutch made of rotten wood is another.

add-sub-mul-div 4/3/2025||

Also, a crutch for doing long division is not the same as a crutch for general thinking and creativity.

rini17 4/3/2025||

It isn't something completely new, there are many cases of unwarranted trust in machines even before computers existed. AI just adds persuasion.

The "Pray Mr. Babbage..." anecdote comes to mind: https://www.azquotes.com/quote/14183

zarmin 4/4/2025||

This comment indirectly represents my current biggest fear with respect to AI; I have encountered a disturbing lack of comprehension for figurative language. Abstractions, analogies, and figurative language are, I believe, critical tools for thinking. "Rotten wood, what are you even saying?"

People also seem to be losing their ability to detect satire.

I'm concerned GenAI will lower creative standards too, that people will be fine with the sound of suno, or the look of Dall-E. How then would the arts evolve?

danielbln 4/4/2025||

How will arts evolve? By recombining these things, as it always has. I swear, this thread is a collection of the most curmudgeony people. "People no longer use their memory now that all those pesky books are around".

The kids will be alright.

aaron695 4/3/2025||

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r00m101 4/8/2025||

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AIorNot 4/3/2025|

This is another silly against AI tools - that doesn’t offer useful or insightful suggestions on how to adapt or provide an informed study of areas of concern and - one that capitalizes on the natural worries we have on HN because of our generic fears around critical thinking being lost when AI will take over our jobs - in general, rather like concerns about the web in pre-internet age and SEO in digital marketing age

OSINT only exists because of internet capabilities and google search - ie someone had to learn how to use those new tools just a few years ago and apply critical thinking

AI tools and models are rapidly evolving and more in depth capabilities appearing in the models, all this means the tools are hardly set in stone and the workflows will evolve with them - it’s still up to human oversight to evolve with the tools - the skills of human overseeing AI is something that will develop too

card_zero 4/3/2025||

The article is all about that oversight. It ends with a ten point checklist with items such as "Did I treat GenAI as a thought partner—not a source of truth?".

cmiles74 4/3/2025|||

So weak! No matter how good a model gets it will always present information with confidence regardless of whether or not it's correct. Anyone that has spent five minutes with the tools I knows this.

mattgreenrocks 4/4/2025||

I’ve read enough pseudo-intellectual Internet comments that I tend to subconsciously apply a slight negative bias to posts that appear to try too hard to project an air of authority via confidence. It isn’t always the best heuristic, as it leaves out the small set of competent and well-marketed people. But it certainly deflates my expectations around LLM output.

salgernon 4/3/2025||

OSINT (not a term I was particularly familiar with, personally) actually goes back quite a ways[1]. Software certainly makes aggregating the information easier to accumulate and finding signal in the noise, but bad security practices do far more to make that information accessible.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16161262.2023.2...

eesmith 4/4/2025||

Back in the 1990s my boss went to a conference where there was a talk on OSINT.

She was interested in the then-new concept of "open source" so went to the talk, only to find it had nothing to do with software development.