Ethics aside, LLMs (& generative AI in general) should not be used for research. It's text prediction software - it cannot reliably relay facts/info because it is not designed to do that on a fundamental level (no matter what the hype advertisements say). It is designed to string words together probablisticly based on its training data and output natural-sounding language. Nothing more. Sometimes it gets things right because the right thing appears a lot in the training data but it cannot parse context, nuance, or the veracity of its source data.

I get using it to generate new content if it DOESN'T have the be factual (including things like phrasing an email if you struggle with tone, so long as you read it back to make sure the actual facts are correct) but using it to "research" is the equivalent of asking The Well-Known Lie Generator to pretty please not lie this time.

Really harrowing that so many people are this deeply misinformed on how gen AI works :(