Approaching Human-Level Data Coding? A Systematic Comparison of OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Human Coders in Qualitative Analysis of Customer Reviews
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The rapid growth of online reviews presents both opportunities and challenges for qualitative research. Human coding ensures contextual accuracy but is difficult to scale. This study compares human coding with AI-assisted coding using OpenAI GPT-4o and DeepSeek r1 on customer reviews of a complex DIY product. Results show both platforms capture underlying relationships, with OpenAI aligning more closely with human coding and DeepSeek demonstrating stronger internal consistency. Systematic AI errors mainly take the form of conservative Type I errors. Findings suggest AI can complement, rather than replace, human coders to enhance scalability and efficiency.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.550 | 0.771 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".