Generic AI has profound implications for research. While its potential can be tempting, it also brings ethical challenges and risks. We have put together an editorial in the Information Systems Journal where we unearth and comment on many facets of qualitative data-related ethics. We hope this will engage researchers working with qualitative data analysis, including editors, (prospective) authors, reviewers and readers. Article The ethics of using generative AI for qualitative data analysis
I believe the use of AI for qualitative research is far-reaching and profound. But you are quite right in the challenge of ethics and risk. While the ethical issues involved in qualitative research have been described repeatedly, I wonder if AI challenges for ethics and risk are primarily in the analysis phases of research. These phases occur repeatedly and sometimes concurrently with observation, interviews, and other methods of data "collection" (some would say "creation"), and while this might appear to suggest this would be ongoing in the research, I suspect it is at the points where AI is actively engaged that the challenges of risk and ethics related to AI would be most crucial. This is an important question, and I appreciate your raising it.
Donald Ratcliff, thank you for the reply. In this paper, we chose to focus only on the analysis of qualitative data. I do believe that other parts of research, such as the inclusion of AI in the writing of research papers, raise other but not less important ethical challenges.
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