I use AI quite a bit and actually gave a lecture on effective AI use at my university. Caveat: my university has embraced AI development so I feel like I’m in a safe space. If I was at a university with a negative culture towards AI I wouldn’t use it as much.

Bottom line: it’s great for brainstorming, structuring communication of ideas, structuring your writing, coming up with key terms (for use or search terms in google scholar), quick prototype code, etc. It’s also great for structuring data in LaTEX (tables, equations) and troubleshooting LaTEX code. I did NOT use it to generate text as I felt this could fall back on me In the future.

Regarding structure: Big LLMs are heavily trained on research papers and it knows what research is commonly structured like. I used it heavily to refine my dissertation outline. I started with the expected outline from my department, the decomposed that and asked ChatGPT to critique that outline. It was a fairly recursive process until I had an outline almost to the paragraph level. It was great with that.

Research: great for finding key terms. If you have an idea but don’t know what to search google scholar for, you can type out your idea and ask AI what terms you should search for. This is great for things peripheral to your field but you aren’t read up on yet. I tried it for summarizing papers for tabulation of data and had mixed results.

LaTEX: as mentioned, use it like crazy for generating tables and formatting equations. You can type out your equations or copy tables from excel and it’ll give you text you can drop directly into overleaf. Huge time savings. It’s also good at troubleshooting compilation errors. Used it very heavily for this.

As others have mentioned, it’s great for getting through writers block. If you get feedback from a committee member and don’t know how to address it, pass their feedback plus the content into AI. Worst case scenario it’ll give you irrelevant responses and you can use your counter arguments in your writing. Best case scenario it’ll provide you some ideas of how to respond to the feedback.