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ABSTRACT
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.
Acknowledgement
Many thanks to Antonia Lyons, Deborah Lupton, Virginia Braun, and Clive Aspin for generously reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this article. Thanks also to Simon McCallum, Annemarie Jutel, and Bonnie Etherington for sharing their thoughts and comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Our larger team also includes Antonia Lyons, Deborah Lupton, and Clive Aspin.
2 Disciplines tend to disagree whether AI can understand context. Broadly speaking, computer scientists argue that AI can understand context by processing meaning between words to generate knowledge about the range of conditions that undergirds language and surround people or events. In contrast, researchers in the humanities contend that context is beyond the computational and draws from subjectivity, the senses, and/or embodied experiences.
3 Demographic details were collected at the start of participation. Participants’ own descriptors have been used.
4 Glossary of Te Reo Māori terms.
auare ake = no way
kia tere = hurry
puku = stomach
kua pai = it’s okay
waea atu ki ia = ring him
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Alexandra F. Gibson
Dr. Alexandra F. Gibson is a Senior Lecturer and Acting Programme Director of Health Psychology at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington. Ally currently holds a Marsden Fast-Start Fellowship with the Royal Society - Te Apārangi, leading research on people’s experiences of mobile dating during the COVID-19 pandemic in Aotearoa New Zealand. She has over 10 years’ experience conducting a range of qualitative research projects relating to health, illness, and the practice of medicine. Her work is interdisciplinary, bridging health psychology, the sociology of health and illness, and public health.
Alexander Beattie
Dr. Alexander Beattie is a Lecturer in Science Communication at the School for Science in Society, Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington. His work explores media resistance, digital wellbeing and the media and technology industries. He is currently researching news avoidance and political attitudes towards science communicators in Aotearoa New Zealand.