Wisdom of the AI Crowd (AI-CROWD) for Ground Truth Approximation in Content Analysis: A Research Protocol & Validation Using Eleven Large Language Models

Abstract: Large-scale content analysis is increasingly limited by the absence of observable ground truth or gold-standard labels, as creating such benchmarks through extensive human coding becomes impractical for massive datasets due to high time, cost, and consistency challenges. To overcome this barrier, we introduce the AI-CROWD protocol, which approximates ground truth by leveraging the collective outputs of an ensemble of LLMs. Rather than asserting that the resulting labels are true ground truth, the protocol generates a consensus-based approximation derived from convergent and divergent inferences across multiple models. By aggregating outputs via majority voting and interrogating agreement/disagreement patterns with diagnostic metrics, AI-CROWD identifies high-confidence classifications while flagging potential ambiguity or model-specific biases.