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Reflexivity on the role of AI in research: am I staying in form AND raising the bar?

Inspired by discussions in conferences and online (including in this forum), I decided to put together the linked article exploring the use of AI in qualitative research.

I am a great believer in the ability of professionals to tap to their judgement and tools to produce great outcomes, and felt that the AI debate in qual too often get’s reduced as “AI good / AI bad” overall, or then into trying to be normative on which specific steps it can be applied and where “there be dragons”. That’s why in this position piece I anchor AI to the question of reflexivity - how as a researcher am I using this tool.

Reflecting on usage allows self-discovery and improvement. Following dogma curtails learning. This tension is common in all evolving fields.

There are two sides to the question. First one I call “staying in form” and that is abot safeguarding against the familiar risks of sloppy AI tools. The second one is “raising the bar”, and asks if I am actually improving quality and depth now that new tools are available. For example, am I elevating the role of junior researchers and research assistants (“just hire a research assistant to code your material” is a common quip in this forum…) in the thinking process.

Again in full transparency I am the co-founder at Skimle, and the article is also hosted on the Skimle blog. We’re building professional tools for professional researchers, and a part of that is engaging in how knowledge work is changing.

Hello everyone, this is Olli, the co-founder of Skimle (http://skimle.com), a tool for transparent, rigorous and versatile qualitative research.

I wanted to share some recent updates to Skimle as together with prof. Henri Schildt and the rest of the Skimle team we just finished a major overhaul of the platform.

Skimle now has
- Ability to upload text, audio & video (automatically transcribed) and tabular data; mix and match in one project up to around 1000 docs
- Ability to anonymise sensitive data
- Three types of analyses: automatic thematic analysis (inductive), predefined categories (deductive) and Agentic Analysis (research question based)
- Full two way transparency from summary to quote and quote to summary
- Manual control to edit categories and coding (code like in Nvivo or MAXQDA type manual tools)
- Mixed methods visualisations and charts
- Ability to compare categories e.g., men vs. women both qualitatively and quantitatively
- Export reports or to REFI-QDA open source format
- Collaborate with humans and agents (MCP)

I don’t want to promote this further as per the sub rules, but happy to answer questions! It’s also free to try out up to 200 pages.

Renaissance of qualitative :)

I did a little demonstration experiment on how hallucinations and bias show up when it comes to using vanilla AI systems. Many are focusing on ”first-order” hallucinations where the LLM for example invents quotes or citations. But I would argue second-order hallucinations are worse: when the LLM invents a plausible finding and supports that with facts and real quotes… but the finding is not true.

To test the latter I created a dataset with 650 rows of customer feedback statements about "widgets" customers had bought, shuffled the rows and then added a column randomly stating if each came from a US or Finnish consumer. So pure noise no signal.

But Claude Sonnet, Opus and other LLMs I tried were really effective in "finding" plausible sounding differences in the data, all conveniently conforming to cultural stereotypes, for example between talkative Americans and terse Finns; or Finns preferring no-nonsense campaigns vs. Americans loving emotion. Claude and other models show quotes and examples to prove their point, and explain it in a way that even I was convinced there was something real in the (random) data.

Then I took the source data table and flipped each row so the "US comments" were labelled as coming from a Finn, and vice versa. I fed the new data to the AI in a new session... and again it found evidence to very similar conclusions even though the data was 180 degrees opposite.

Using AI in this way makes the user happy, but is not defensible. And it's hard to verify the results since all you get back is a verbose explanation matching your expectations well wrapped on top of a black box. Claude ended the analysis with a few suggested action points on how to change e.g., the campaign messaging to resonate in different countries... a potentially costly decision with zero supporting evidence in the data.

So be careful out there!

Happy to share the dataset if people want to replicate this themselves.

Just came back from a 3.5 week road trip from Finland to Turkey and back with a Kia EV9 and wanted to share my notes.

Overall, things keep improving every summer, and in 2026 doing a road trip with a full electric car was not an issue. Charging did not slow us down, but you need to plan your stops a bit.

Estonia-Latvia-Lithuania
- OK availability of fast chargers. Many still require app or QR code but no issues charging

Poland
- Great infrastructure along the new highways and lots of tap-to-pay stations

Hungary-Serbia-Bulgaria
- Some planning needed especially outside main motorways but relatively easy to charge

Turkey
- You need a local SIM card / Turkish phone number to register to local apps like Trugo! You can buy a travel SIM for this. Once we got the apps to work, charging was easy
- European EV9 maps and Kia Connect don’t work in Turkey, so e.g., remote control did not work.

Greece
- Max charge limit on ferries is 40%… took some planning to reach that for our Cesme-Chios-Athens ferries (but nobody checked it).
- PPC Blue was our app here, no issues

Albania
- iCharge was the app of choice and worked well. Interestingly all stations had both Chinese (GBT) and European (CCS2) chargers, and there were lots of Chinese EVs brands like BYD around)

Montenegro
- Did not charge here just drove through

Croatia
- Somewhat sparse network. Ended up slow charging while visiting Dubrovnik. Elen was our app here.

Slovenia
- Remember to buy vignette - we did not and paid 150 EUR fee :(
- Charging not an issue

Austria
- Lots of chargers in the Alps and beyond
- Also a vignette country, this time we remembered :)

Czech
- EVs are exempt from vignette but you need to register
- Good charging

Happy to answer any questions! Overall was very positively surprised how easy it was to travel with an EV across multiple countries. Ended up installing maybe 10 new charging apps and gave credit card details to dozens of websites, but was ultimately able to get the chargers to work 95% of times…