How is the use of AI in auditing perceived by auditors in social media ?

Sammanfattning

Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to critically evaluate posts/comments collected from social media on AI auditing to analyze how auditors perceive the application of AI in the auditing industry currently. Methodology: We did qualitative research using content analysis to conduct our research. We scraped posts/comments from Reddit, Quora, and Weibo for information collection purposes. We used a paraphrasing approach for privacy concerns and we also used MAXQDA, which is a qualitative and mixed methods academic research software, to analyze the data collected. Theoretical perspectives: We analyzed the posts/comments from a perspective of epistemic trust theory to understand how trust contributes to information sharing in various social settings. Empirical foundation: To establish the empirical foundation, the data was collected by scraping posts from social media from 2018 to 2024 regarding how auditors perceive AI auditing. For a cross-cultural perspective, data that includes posts/comments was collected from social platforms in different countries such as the US and China, and 163 valid posts/comments were recognized after filtering certain keywords such as ‘AI’, ‘Audit’, and ‘Artificial intelligence”. For relevance and significance, we manually review the posts/comments to refine our dataset. The research is based on qualitative content analysis and it is conducted with MAXQDA, which is a qualitative and mixed method research software. Conclusions: Applying the concept of epistemic trust (McCraw, 2015) and doing content analysis with posts/comments from social media provide us with a unique perspective on how AI auditing is viewed by auditors. It was discovered that auditors have similar and some different opinions as they are affected by various cultural factors. The main difference between auditors with different cultural backgrounds is that auditors using Reddit and Quora state that while AI can enhance auditing efficiency and accuracy in repetitive tasks, it cannot replace auditors completely for its lack of professional judgment while others using Weibo consider the replacement challenging as it cannot be held accountable for misjudgments.