This paper reflects on the literature that rejects the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in qualitative data analysis. It illustrates through empirical evidence as well as critical reflections why the current critical debate is focusing on the wrong problems . The paper proposes that the focus of researching the use of the LLMs for qualitative analysis is not the method per se, but rather the empirical investigation of an artificial system performing an analysis . The paper bui lds on the seminal work of Alan Turing and reads the current debate using key ideas from Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". Th is paper therefore reframes the debate on qualitative analysis with LLMs and states that ra ther than asking whether machines can perform qualitative analysis in principle, we should ask whether with LLMs we can produce analyses that are sufficiently comparable to human analysts. In the final part the contrary views to performing qualitative analysis with LLMs are analysed using the same writing and rhetorical style that Turing used in his seminal work, to discuss the contrary views to the main question.

The emergence of open data portals necessitates more attention to protecting sensitive data before datasets get published and exchanged. While an abundance of methods for suppressing sensitive data exist, the conceptualization of sensitive data and methods to detect it, focus particularly on personal data that, if disclosed, may be harmful or violate privacy. We observe the need for refining and broadening our definitions of sensitive data, and argue that the sensitivity of data depends on its context. Based on this definition, we introduce two mechanisms for contextual sensitive data detection that consider the broader context of a dataset at hand. First, we introduce type contextualization, which first detects the semantic type of particular data values, then considers the overall context of the data values within the dataset or document. Second, we introduce domain contextualization which determines sensitivity of a given dataset in the broader context based on the retrieval of relevant rules from documents that specify data sensitivity (e.g., data topic and geographic origin). Experiments with these mechanisms, assisted by large language models (LLMs), confirm that: 1) type-contextualization significantly reduces the number of false positives for type-based sensitive data detection and reaches a recall of 94% compared to 63% with commercial tools, and 2) domain-contextualization leveraging sensitivity rule retrieval is effective for context-grounded sensitive data detection in non-standard data domains such as humanitarian datasets. Evaluation with humanitarian data experts also reveals that context-grounded LLM explanations provide useful guidance in manual data auditing processes, improving consistency. We open-source mechanisms and annotated datasets for contextual sensitive data detection at https://github.com/trl-lab/sensitive-data-detection.

Two 2025 publications, "AI 2027" (Kokotajlo et al., 2025) and "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" (Yudkowsky & Soares, 2025), assert that superintelligent artificial intelligence will almost certainly destroy or render humanity obsolete within the next decade. Both rest on the classic chain formulated by Good (1965) and Bostrom (2014): intelligence explosion, superintelligence, lethal misalignment. This article subjects each link to the empirical record of 2023-2025. Sixty years after Good's speculation, none of the required phenomena (sustained recursive self-improvement, autonomous strategic awareness, or intractable lethal misalignment) have been observed. Current generative models remain narrow, statistically trained artefacts: powerful, opaque, and imperfect, but devoid of the properties that would make the catastrophic scenarios plausible. Following Whittaker (2025a, 2025b, 2025c) and Zuboff (2019, 2025), we argue that the existential-risk thesis functions primarily as an ideological distraction from the ongoing consolidation of surveillance capitalism and extreme concentration of computational power. The thesis is further inflated by the 2025 AI speculative bubble, where trillions in investments in rapidly depreciating "digital lettuce" hardware (McWilliams, 2025) mask lagging revenues and jobless growth rather than heralding superintelligence. The thesis remains, in November 2025, a speculative hypothesis amplified by a speculative financial bubble rather than a demonstrated probability.

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly integrated into education, understanding how students perceive its risks is essential for supporting responsible and effective adoption. This research aimed to examine the relationships between perceived AI competence and risks among Finnish K-12 upper secondary students (n = 163) by utilizing a co-occurrence analysis. Students reported their self-perceived AI competence and concerns related to AI across systemic, institutional, and personal domains. The findings showed that students with lower competence emphasized personal and learning-related risks, such as reduced creativity, lack of critical thinking, and misuse, whereas higher-competence students focused more on systemic and institutional risks, including bias, inaccuracy, and cheating. These differences suggest that students' self-reported AI competence is related to how they evaluate both the risks and opportunities associated with artificial intelligence in education (AIED). The results of this study highlight the need for educational institutions to incorporate AI literacy into their curricula, provide teacher guidance, and inform policy development to ensure personalized opportunities for utilization and equitable integration of AI into K-12 education.

Constructed-response questions are crucial to encourage generative processing and test a learner's understanding of core concepts. However, the limited availability of instructor time, large class sizes, and other resource constraints pose significant challenges in providing timely and detailed evaluation, which is crucial for a holistic educational experience. In addition, providing timely and frequent assessments is challenging since manual grading is labor intensive, and automated grading is complex to generalize to every possible response scenario. This paper proposes a novel and practical approach to grade short-answer constructed-response questions. We discuss why this problem is challenging, define the nature of questions on which our method works, and finally propose a framework that instructors can use to evaluate their students' open-responses, utilizing near-domain data like data from similar questions administered in previous years. The proposed method outperforms the state of the art machine learning models as well as non-fine-tuned large language models like GPT 3.5, GPT 4, and GPT 4o by a considerable margin of over 10-20% in some cases, even after providing the LLMs with reference/model answers. Our framework does not require pre-written grading rubrics and is designed explicitly with practical classroom settings in mind. Our results also reveal exciting insights about learning from near-domain data, including what we term as accuracy and data advantages using human-labeled data, and we believe this is the first work to formalize the problem of automated short answer grading based on the near-domain data.

The future of digital marketing lies in the convergence of human creativity and generative AI, where insight, strategy, and storytelling are co-authored by intelligent systems. We present MindFuse, a brave new explainable generative AI framework designed to act as a strategic partner in the marketing process. Unlike conventional LLM applications that stop at content generation, MindFuse fuses CTR-based content AI-guided co-creation with large language models to extract, interpret, and iterate on communication narratives grounded in real advertising data. MindFuse operates across the full marketing lifecycle: from distilling content pillars and customer personas from competitor campaigns to recommending in-flight optimizations based on live performance telemetry. It uses attention-based explainability to diagnose ad effectiveness and guide content iteration, while aligning messaging with strategic goals through dynamic narrative construction and storytelling. We introduce a new paradigm in GenAI for marketing, where LLMs not only generate content but reason through it, adapt campaigns in real time, and learn from audience engagement patterns. Our results, validated in agency deployments, demonstrate up to 12 times efficiency gains, setting the stage for future integration with empirical audience data (e.g., GWI, Nielsen) and full-funnel attribution modeling. MindFuse redefines AI not just as a tool, but as a collaborative agent in the creative and strategic fabric of modern marketing.

LLM-powered coding agents are reshaping the development paradigm. However, existing evaluation systems, neither traditional tests for humans nor benchmarks for LLMs, fail to capture this shift. They remain focused on well-defined algorithmic problems, which excludes problems where success depends on human-AI collaboration. Such collaborative problems not only require human reasoning to interpret complex contexts and guide solution strategies, but also demand AI efficiency for implementation. To bridge this gap, we introduce HAI-Eval, a unified benchmark designed to measure the synergy of human-AI partnership in coding. HAI-Eval's core innovation is its "Collaboration-Necessary" problem templates, which are intractable for both standalone LLMs and unaided humans, but solvable through effective collaboration. Specifically, HAI-Eval uses 45 templates to dynamically create tasks. It also provides a standardized IDE for human participants and a reproducible toolkit with 450 task instances for LLMs, ensuring an ecologically valid evaluation. We conduct a within-subject study with 45 participants and benchmark their performance against 5 state-of-the-art LLMs under 4 different levels of human intervention. Results show that standalone LLMs and unaided participants achieve poor pass rates (0.67% and 18.89%), human-AI collaboration significantly improves performance to 31.11%. Our analysis reveals an emerging co-reasoning partnership. This finding challenges the traditional human-tool hierarchy by showing that strategic breakthroughs can originate from either humans or AI. HAI-Eval establishes not only a challenging benchmark for next-generation coding agents but also a grounded, scalable framework for assessing core developer competencies in the AI era. Our benchmark and interactive demo will be openly accessible.

High-stakes decision domains are increasingly exploring the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex decision-making tasks. However, LLM deployment in real-world settings presents challenges in data security, evaluation of its capabilities outside controlled environments, and accountability attribution in the event of adversarial decisions. This paper proposes a framework for responsible deployment of LLM-based decision-support systems through active human involvement. It integrates interactive collaboration between human experts and developers through multiple iterations at the pre-deployment stage to assess the uncertain samples and judge the stability of the explanation provided by post-hoc XAI techniques. Local LLM deployment within organizations and decentralized technologies, such as Blockchain and IPFS, are proposed to create immutable records of LLM activities for automated auditing to enhance security and trace back accountability. It was tested on Bert-large-uncased, Mistral, and LLaMA 2 and 3 models to assess the capability to support responsible financial decisions on business lending.

As generative artificial intelligence (AI) continues to transform education, most existing AI evaluations rely primarily on technical performance metrics such as accuracy or task efficiency while overlooking human identity, learner agency, contextual learning processes, and ethical considerations. In this paper, we present TEACH-AI (Trustworthy and Effective AI Classroom Heuristics), a domain-independent, pedagogically grounded, and stakeholder-aligned framework with measurable indicators and a practical toolkit for guiding the design, development, and evaluation of generative AI systems in educational contexts. Built on an extensive literature review and synthesis, the ten-component assessment framework and toolkit checklist provide a foundation for scalable, value-aligned AI evaluation in education. TEACH-AI rethinks "evaluation" through sociotechnical, educational, theoretical, and applied lenses, engaging designers, developers, researchers, and policymakers across AI and education. Our work invites the community to reconsider what constructs "effective" AI in education and to design model evaluation approaches that promote co-creation, inclusivity, and long-term human, social, and educational impact.

Abstract--Few-shot prompting has emerged as a practical alternative to fine-tuning for leveraging the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in specialized tasks. However, its effectiveness depends heavily on the selection and quality of in-context examples, particularly in complex domains. In this work, we examine retrieval-augmented prompting as a strategy to improve few-shot performance in code vulnerability detection, where the goal is to identify one or more security-relevant weaknesses present in a given code snippet from a predefined set of vulnerability categories. We perform a systematic evaluation using the Gemini-1.5-Flash Our results show that retrieval-augmented prompting consistently outperforms the other prompting strategies. At 20 shots, it achieves an F1 score of 74.05% and a partial match accuracy of 83.90%. We further compare this approach against zero-shot prompting and several fine-tuned models, including Gemini-1.5-Flash Retrieval-augmented prompting outperforms both zero-shot (F1 score: 36.35%, On the other hand, fine-tuning CodeBERT yields higher performance (F1 score: 91.22%, partial match accuracy: 91.30%) but requires additional training, maintenance effort, and resources.