The Slow Collapse of Critical Thinking in OSINT Due to AI

Summary

OSINT used to be a thinking game. Now it’s becoming a trusting game and that should terrify you.I’ve seen it firsthand, analysts running solid investigations, then slowly shifting more and more of the thinking to GenAI tools. At first, it’s small. You use ChatGPT to summarise a document or translate a foreign post. Then it’s helping draft your reports. Then it’s generating leads. And eventually, you’re not thinking as critically as you used to. You’re verifying less, questioning less, relying more.We tell ourselves we’re “working smarter.” But somewhere along the way, we stop noticing how much of the actual thinking is being offloaded.This isn’t a rant against AI. I use it daily, ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Gemini. They’re in my workflow like everyone else’s. But the tradecraft is slipping. Analysts are skipping the hard parts. They’re trusting GenAI to do the heavy cognitive lifting, and it’s changing how we operate at a foundational level.When OSINT becomes too easy, too efficient, too comfortable… you should be worried. Tradecraft isn’t just about speed, it’s about judgment. And judgment doesn’t come from a language model. If we keep going down this path without pushing back, without actively preserving the critical habits that define our profession, we risk becoming operators of automation instead of investigators.This blog is a wake-up call. For myself. For anyone working in OSINT. For the people teaching it, and the people just getting started. If we don’t reclaim the thinking side of this game, we’ll lose the game entirely.The Study That Should Alarm YouWhat they found is a warning shot.The study revealed a clear pattern: the more confidence users had in the AI, the less they thought critically. In contrast, the more confident they were in themselves, the more likely they were to question the output, verify the information, and think deeply about the task.Let that sink in: Confidence in AI replaces confidence in self and with it, the thinking disappears.High tr...