When the purpose of your writing is to showcase your thoughts, using AI at any stage of it (including the research stage) seems a dereliction of duty, precisely because people are expecting to hear what you think, not a machine.
I wouldn't go quite that far on research-- we want people to inform their thinking with the best information possible, and LLMs are good at structured information-retrieval. Obviously one must do some due diligence, but that's equally true of relying on human-written secondary sources, or whatever Google throws at you.
I suppose it depends on what you're using AI to do for you in that research context. If it helps you find sources that you then spend time to read and scrutinise (perhaps with AI help), then you're becoming wiser for that effort. If you're using AI to do the search and integrating those sources without you doing the work to understand what they say and whether they're robust, that's intellectually lazy. There has been a lot of research recently on AI removing the friction from life, and while that can appear tempting, it's not really good for us, as it's by doing things that are hard that we grow. I guess we should strive to be more like Skylar than Will.
When the purpose of your writing is to showcase your thoughts, using AI at any stage of it (including the research stage) seems a dereliction of duty, precisely because people are expecting to hear what you think, not a machine.
I wouldn't go quite that far on research-- we want people to inform their thinking with the best information possible, and LLMs are good at structured information-retrieval. Obviously one must do some due diligence, but that's equally true of relying on human-written secondary sources, or whatever Google throws at you.
I suppose it depends on what you're using AI to do for you in that research context. If it helps you find sources that you then spend time to read and scrutinise (perhaps with AI help), then you're becoming wiser for that effort. If you're using AI to do the search and integrating those sources without you doing the work to understand what they say and whether they're robust, that's intellectually lazy. There has been a lot of research recently on AI removing the friction from life, and while that can appear tempting, it's not really good for us, as it's by doing things that are hard that we grow. I guess we should strive to be more like Skylar than Will.