The strength of artificial intelligence lies in its ability to process and analyze huge amounts of data. It can find patterns, tease out connections, even find related data, but AI lacks the spark of creativity necessary to make inferences from the data or to understand what the data actually mean or how they can be used. Because of this, it is useless as a tool for primary research, but can be highly effective in assisting researchers with secondary research or literature reviews.
AI should NOT be used as the only tool for secondary research, though. While it is able to process vast quantities of published texts, it is constrained by copyright and licensing considerations to searching and analyzing only those materials freely available on the public web or for which the AI provider has purchased licensing rights. Currently, no AI research assistants can fully access the majority of material behind paywalls, which includes most scientific and technical research papers. For this reason AI should always be used in conjunction with traditional database searches.
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