October 2026
AI assistance in expertise-intensive work presents a tension between performance and learning: AI tools may raise the quality of the work a professional delivers while stunting the expertise they would otherwise develop in producing it. In a pre-registered three-month randomized controlled trial, the research team led by Blueprint Director, David Autor, gave 133 practicing patent lawyers at eleven U.S. intellectual property law firms access to a custom AI patent drafting assistant and measured both their performance while using AI and their professional judgment afterward without it.
Subscribe for Updates
