The ‘Implicit Intelligence’ of artificial intelligence. Investigating the potential of large language models in social science research

Researchers in 'hard' science disciplines are exploring the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence (Al) for advancing research in their fields. Their colleagues in 'soft' science, however, have produced thus far a limited number of articles on this subject. This paper addresses this gap. Our main hypothesis is that existing Artificial Intelligence Large Language Models (LLMs) can closely align with human expert assessments in specialized social science surveys.