An OSINT analyst piece pointing to a Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon paper begins with a troubling scene of how we might work:
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.
Like any other anxious white-collar worker, I’m no stranger to what an AI-augmented workday could look like. But what drove me to the original research was this:
Confidence in AI replaces confidence in self and with it, the thinking disappears.
