More or less than human? Evaluating the role of AI-as-participant in online qualitative research

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12733227
AutoresAlexandra Gibson (0000-0002-9976-964X, Victoria University of Wellington, autor de correspondencia), A Beattie (0000-0001-8537-7672, Victoria University of Wellington)
Año2024
Volumen21
Número2
Páginas175-199
Fecha de publicación2024-02-05
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaQualitative Research in Psychology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1478-0887 • E-ISSN: 1478-0895
EditorialTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14780887.2024.2311427
OpenAlexW4391542643
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas12
Referencias citadas32

Artificial intelligence (AI) has an increasing presence in scholarship, posing new challenges and opportunities for qualitative researchers. Generative AI, such as Chat-GPT, can supposedly produce humanlike responses, which has implications for online qualitative research, which relies on human participation. In this paper, we contribute to debates about AI as a research participant ('AI-as-participant') and the threat of imposter participation in qualitative research. We share our unexpected encounter with AI during our story completion study on mobile dating during the COVID-19 pandemic and discuss how we identified AI responses within our dataset. Central to our analysis was our theoretical grounding of feminist new materialism, which attuned us to the affective and discursive qualities of our participant data. Using our theoretical lens, in tandem with other strategies, we examined the affective forces that signalled stark differences between previous, human-generated data and that of the current study. Analysing the discursive construction of narratives further alerted us to the absence of humans within our data. We conclude that AI cannot sufficiently replicate affect or capture the richness of human experience that is central to qualitative research, and offer recommendations for future researchers to anticipate and check for AI as an unwelcome research participant

Epistemology · Participant observation · Qualitative research · Social science · Sociology · Focus Groups and Qualitative Methods · Philosophy · Psychology · Qualitative Research Methods and Applications · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics