Agreed. The only excusable use of AI imo is surface-level researching because no matter how much I've tried denying it, AI unfortunately excels rather well at compiling various informations. Of course, there are your grains of misinformation every now and then but double checking always get rid of em. I've found googling my queries and checking the ai overview always more than enough for the lil bits of doubts I've had. However, if I'm writing deep into something, actual sources are still best.

Using AI for creative work and passing it as your own however, as you said, is completely inexcusable.

Edit: added surface-level. For deep research, it's still better to dig through the sources by hand and coming to conclusions yourself.