What’s the Use of Qualitative Interviews?

Abstract

Humans have been asking questions of one another to gain information for centuries. Until recently, the interviewee and interviewer roles were occupied by humans. With the advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), human interviewers can now be replaced by artificial intelligence avatars who as autonomous agents can modify their questions and respond to human participants, while Large Language Models can simulate human participants in response to interviewers’ questions. This article reviews the history of interviewing before examining the roles played by GenAI in qualitative interview research. A case is made for retaining human interviewers and interviewees in qualitative interview research.

Keywords

qualitative interviews generative AI qualitative research AI interviewers Large Learning Models

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