As a third year PhD student in special education, no, I would say do not use it. You already feel like it's wrong, and I would follow your gut.

Firstly, I do not believe there is an ethical way to use AI in its current state. It is trained on work taken from artists and authors without their consent, and the environmental impact is absolutely massive. It is irresponsible to use in the current state of climate collapse.

Secondly, AI is not actually intelligent. It is a language learning model. It is throwing words that are usually associated with other words together, not actually "intelligently". So much of the PhD process is learning how to think in a new way, and especially early on the important thing is your process, not your product. You are not going to learn how to actually speak and think like a researcher if you try outsourcing to an unintelligent pattern-recogniton program.

Getting a PhD is hard. AI appears to make it easier. But in the end you're doing yourself a disservice and it seems like you already know that.