AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. What I do not do is predict the future. No one can predict the future, which is a good thing, since if the future were predictable, that would mean we couldn't change it. Now, not everyone understands the distinction. They think science-fiction writers are oracles. Even some of my colleagues labor under the delusion that we can "see the future". Then there are science-fiction fans who believe that they are the future. A depressing number of those people appear to have become AI bros. These guys can't shut up about the day that their spicy autocomplete machine will wake up and turn us all into paperclips has led many confused journalists and conference organizers to try to get me to comment on the future of AI. That's something I used to strenuously resist doing, because I wasted two years of my life explaining patiently and repeatedly why I thought crypto was stupid, and getting relentlessly bollocked by cryptocurrency cultists who at first insisted that I just didn't understand crypto.

This paper investigates the automation of qualitative data analysis, focusing on inductive coding using large language models (LLMs). Unlike traditional approaches that rely on deductive methods with predefined labels, this research investigates the inductive process where labels emerge from the data. The study evaluates the performance of six open-source LLMs compared to human experts. As part of the evaluation, experts rated the perceived difficulty of the quotes they coded. The results reveal a peculiar dichotomy: human coders consistently perform well when labeling complex sentences but struggle with simpler ones, while LLMs exhibit the opposite trend. Additionally, the study explores systematic deviations in both human and LLM generated labels by comparing them to the golden standard from the test set. While human annotations may sometimes differ from the golden standard, they are often rated more favorably by other humans. In contrast, some LLMs demonstrate closer alignment with the true labels but receive lower evaluations from experts.

--We introduce CollabT oolBuilder, a flexible multi-agent LLM framework with expert-in-the-loop (HITL) guidance that iteratively learns to create tools for a target goal, aligning with human intent and process, while minimizing time for task/domain adaptation effort and human feedback capture. The architecture generates and validates tools via four specialized agents (Coach, Coder, Critic, Capitalizer) using a reinforced dynamic prompt and systematic human feedback integration to reinforce each agent's role toward goals and constraints. This work is best viewed as a system-level integration and methodology combining multi-agent in-context learning, HITL controls, and reusable tool capitalization for complex iterative problems such as scientific document generation. We illustrate it with preliminary experiments (e.g., generating state-of-the-art research papers or patents given an abstract) and discuss its applicability to other iterative problem-solving. Self-learning multi-agent LLMs and tool-making frameworks [1] have demonstrated promising capabilities in structured domains such as 3D sandbox games [2], [3], sequential skill acquisition [4], and mathematical discovery [5]. However, tackling ambiguous or non-factual problems requires additional multistep cognitive processes [6], [7]. These include collaborative agents' reasoning [6], [7], Chain-of-Thought problem solving [8], compositional question handling [9], action planning [10], and multi-agent coordination [11].

Computer-Use Agents (CUA) are becoming increasingly capable of autonomously operating digital environments through Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). Yet, most GUI remain designed primarily for humans--prioritizing aesthetics and usability--forcing agents to adopt human-oriented behaviors that are unnecessary for efficient task execution. At the same time, rapid advances in coding-oriented language models (Coder) have transformed automatic GUI design. This raises a fundamental question: Can CUA as judges to assist Coder for automatic GUI design? To investigate, we introduce AUI-Gym, a benchmark for Automatic GUI development spanning 52 applications across diverse domains. Using language models, we synthesize 1560 tasks that simulate real-world scenarios. To ensure task reliability, we further develop a verifier that programmatically checks whether each task is executable within its environment. Building on this, we propose a Coder-CUA in Collaboration framework: the Coder acts as Designer, generating and revising websites, while the CUA serves as Judge, evaluating functionality and refining designs. Success is measured not by visual appearance, but by task solvability and CUA navigation success rate. To turn CUA feedback into usable guidance, we design a CUA Dashboard that compresses multi-step navigation histories into concise visual summaries, offering interpretable guidance for iterative redesign. By positioning agents as both designers and judges, our framework shifts interface design toward agent-native efficiency and reliability. Our work takes a step toward shifting agents from passive use toward active participation in digital environments. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/showlab/AUI.

Explicit deep generative models (DGMs), e.g., V AEs and Normalizing Flows, have

Evaluation and Management (E/M) coding, under the Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) taxonomy, documents medical services provided to patients by physicians. Used primarily for billing purposes, it is in physicians' best interest to provide accurate CPT E/M codes. %While important, it is an auxiliary task that adds to physicians' documentation burden. Automating this coding task will help alleviate physicians' documentation burden, improve billing efficiency, and ultimately enable better patient care. However, a number of real-world complexities have made E/M encoding automation a challenging task. In this paper, we elaborate some of the key complexities and present ProFees, our LLM-based framework that tackles them, followed by a systematic evaluation. On an expert-curated real-world dataset, ProFees achieves an increase in coding accuracy of more than 36\% over a commercial CPT E/M coding system and almost 5\% over our strongest single-prompt baseline, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing the real-world complexities.

Generative Large Language Models (gLLMs), such as ChatGPT, are increasingly being used in communication research for content analysis. Studies show that gLLMs can outperform both crowd workers and trained coders, such as research assistants, on various coding tasks relevant to communication science, often at a fraction of the time and cost. Additionally, gLLMs can decode implicit meanings and contextual information, be instructed using natural language, deployed with only basic programming skills, and require little to no annotated data beyond a validation dataset - constituting a paradigm shift in automated content analysis. Despite their potential, the integration of gLLMs into the methodological toolkit of communication research remains underdeveloped. In gLLM-assisted quantitative content analysis, researchers must address at least seven critical challenges that impact result quality: (1) codebook development, (2) prompt engineering, (3) model selection, (4) parameter tuning, (5) iterative refinement, (6) validation of the model's reliability, and optionally, (7) performance enhancement. This paper synthesizes emerging research on gLLM-assisted quantitative content analysis and proposes a comprehensive best-practice guide to navigate these challenges. Our goal is to make gLLM-based content analysis more accessible to a broader range of communication researchers and ensure adherence to established disciplinary quality standards of validity, reliability, reproducibility, and research ethics.

Measuring the ideational content of populism remains a challenge. Traditional strategies based on textual analysis have been critical for building the field's foundations and providing a valid, objective indicator of populist framing. Yet these approaches are costly, time consuming, and difficult to scale across languages, contexts, and large corpora. Here we present the results from a rubric and anchor guided chain of thought (CoT) prompting approach that mirrors human coder training. By leveraging the Global Populism Database (GPD), a comprehensive dataset of global leaders' speeches annotated for degrees of populism, we replicate the process used to train human coders by prompting the LLM with an adapted version of the same documentation to guide the model's reasoning. We then test multiple proprietary and open weight models by replicating scores in the GPD. Our findings reveal that this domain specific prompting strategy enables the LLM to achieve classification accuracy on par with expert human coders, demonstrating its ability to navigate the nuanced, context sensitive aspects of populism.