Postgraduate students in South Africa and other developing nations face substantial hurdles in completing their research, despite efforts to boost research output and garner subsidies from the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). Key issues include research capacity development and supervision burdens. The potential of conversational AIs, like ChatGPT, as research assistants, has been discussed, but more research needs to be focused on using ChatGPT to support novice and student researchers, especially within resource-poor Global South contexts. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can support the scientific research process, assisting in generating research questions, developing methodology, creating experiments, analysing data, and writing manuscripts.