Dialogues of Sense and Algorithm: Reconfiguring Arts-Based Research in the AI Era

As qualitative research is increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence (AI), new challenges emerge. While AI expands creative possibilities, its integration also risks reducing sensory knowledge to abstract symbols and reinforcing cultural bias. This article introduces Sensory–Algorithmic Dialogue (SAD) as a critical methodological framework that reorients how qualitative research, particularly arts-based research (ABR), engages with AI. Rather than fusing sensory ethnography and algorithmic processes, SAD sustains their difference, treating misalignments not as flaws but as productive frictions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Jingdezhen, a thousand-year-old ceramic art community, we show how AI’s misreading becomes entry points for reflection, where researchers’ multisensory expertise reclaims knowledge overlooked by algorithmic abstraction. In doing so, SAD repositions AI from a passive tool to an active interlocutor, turning algorithmic limitations into opportunities for creativity, critique, and methodological innovation, while deepening ABR’s capacity to sustain embodied, multisensory, and culturally grounded inquiry in the AI era.