{"slug": "does-ai-assistance-enhance-or-erode-expertise", "title": "Does AI assistance enhance or erode expertise?", "summary": "A pre-registered three-month randomized controlled trial of 133 practicing patent lawyers at eleven U.S. intellectual property law firms found that access to a custom AI drafting assistant raised benchmark patent drafting quality by 0.34 SD (p = 0.03) at 10 days and 0.38 SD (p = 0.01) at 90 days, with larger gains among junior lawyers, according to a new NBER working paper by David Autor and co-authors. When all subjects later redlined an existing patent application without AI, treated lawyers outperformed controls by 0.32 SD (p = 0.04), but that advantage was concentrated entirely among senior lawyers (0.45 SD, p = 0.02); junior lawyers showed no average gain, with their scores bifurcating into more poor and more good results and sharply fewer mediocre ones. The authors conclude that foundational expertise may be a prerequisite for extracting durable skill from AI-assisted practice, while noting that over time the allocation of humans to tasks will evolve so that more humans become more productive, not less.", "body_md": "# Does AI assistance enhance or erode expertise?\n\nFrom [a new NBER working paper](https://www.nber.org/papers/w35720#fromrss):\n\nWhether AI assistance builds or erodes professional expertise is unsettled. In a pre-registered three-month randomized controlled trial, we gave 133 practicing patent lawyers at eleven U.S. intellectual property law firms access to a custom AI drafting assistant and measured both their performance while using AI and their professional judgment afterward without it. All work was scored by blinded expert patent attorneys. Paralleling findings from other white-collar domains, AI access raised the quality of work delivered on benchmark patent drafting tasks at 10 days (0.34 SD, p = 0.03) and 90 days (0.38 SD, p = 0.01), with larger gains among junior lawyers. After three months, all subjects redlined an existing patent application without AI, a core task of patent practice requiring expert judgment. Treated lawyers outperformed controls by 0.32 SD (p = 0.04), but this advantage was concentrated entirely among senior lawyers (0.45 SD, p = 0.02). Junior lawyers showed no average gain; their scores instead bifurcated, with sharply fewer mediocre scores offset by more poor and more good ones. The largest gains from AI thus accrued to the lawyers who retained the least. Foundational expertise may be a prerequisite for extracting durable skill from AI-assisted practice.\n\nThat is by David Autor, et.al. Do note that over time the allocation of humans to tasks will evolve so that more of the humans become more productive, not less. RCTs somehow have the odd disadvantage of requiring too many things to be held constant, and so they can miss the benefits of longer-term adjustments.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/does-ai-assistance-enhance-or-erode-expertise", "canonical_source": "https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/does-ai-assistance-enhance-or-erode-expertise.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=does-ai-assistance-enhance-or-erode-expertise", "published_at": "2026-09-14 04:14:34+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-14 04:26:25.760048+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-research", "ai-products", "ai-safety"], "entities": ["David Autor", "NBER", "patent lawyers", "U.S. intellectual property law firms", "AI drafting assistant"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/does-ai-assistance-enhance-or-erode-expertise", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/does-ai-assistance-enhance-or-erode-expertise.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/does-ai-assistance-enhance-or-erode-expertise.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/does-ai-assistance-enhance-or-erode-expertise.jsonld"}}