While generative AI is rapidly evolving as a useful analytic tool, the emerging technology will not be replacing intelligence analysts anytime soon, according to a former CIA official.
During a webinar hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) today, Linda Weissgold, the former CIA deputy director for analysis, explained that generative AI tools will only enhance the overall open-source intelligence (OSINT) data analysis process.
“Generative AI, it’s an analytic tool. It’s not a substitute for an analyst,” Weissgold said. “It’s already helping analysts and the intelligence community find relative information out of those mountains of irrelevant data that’s out there. It’s double-checking that information hasn’t been missed.”
“Eventually, what I would like to see our AI get to is a capability to point out insights that the analysts don’t see,” she added. “Things like, you know, track and tell me that this is the first time something’s happened … those kinds of things that are hard for analysts to keep it in their brain or to identify.”
Weissgold explained that while the technology tools have changed, the basic principles of analytic tradecraft remain the same.
For example, she said that analysts still need to look for disconfirming information and look critically at sources.
This also applies to information gathered from generative AI, she said, as that information generally produces “a reflection of unknowns.” Additionally, she said analysts don’t know what the AI programmer’s parameters or biases are.
“I was at one point, President Bush’s intelligence briefer, and I can’t imagine going in and telling the president in response to a question on, ‘Why are you saying this?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know because the [AI] just told me.’ So, that’s never going to be acceptable. I have to be able to explain why the intelligence community thinks what it thinks.”
“Public trust in the intelligence community needs to be strengthened,” she concluded. “If nobody trusts what we say – it doesn’t matter if it’s declassified – if they think that it’s being done in a political context, it doesn’t matter even if it’s the best intelligence out there.”
