you can dump your thoughts and constraints you can think of, and have it work through untangling, or use it as a summarizing notepad, or yo prototype what you are thinking about in different variations.
its no replacement for pen and paper, but no typed or drawn on tablet picture comes close to a real notebook to scribble on its entirely a thinking tool, as much as a skip-thinking tool
The act of vetting it and finding the failures will increase understanding, but at a cost in speed over doing the research from scratch. (Generating subtly wrong text is often a good way to test understanding, and the output of AI systems is typically a mangled clone of some other well understood system. A very good exercise is building your internal pattern recognition so you can tell what's been mangled, mashed, and served up)
AI is very good at making the mash sound plausible, however, so if you don't look extremely closely, you end up repeating instead of dissecting it. And if you're hoping to learn from the AI how to design a system, you're in trouble.