Does AI help you learn, or just finish the job?

What did they test?

A team led by economist David Autor ran a trial with 133 patent lawyers at eleven firms in the United States. A patent is a legal paper that protects an invention.

About two thirds of the lawyers got an AI drafting helper early. The rest were trained on AI but could not use the tool until the study ended. Expert patent attorneys scored all the work without knowing who had used AI.

Google Research wrote about it on 7 October 2026. The paper is a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which means other experts have not yet reviewed it formally.

What happened?

The less experienced lawyers did not simply get worse. Their scores spread out. There were fewer middle scores and more poor ones and more good ones.

Why should you care?

You are the lawyer in this story every time you ask a chatbot to help with homework or code. The finished work can look better while your own skill stays the same.

The authors suggest that you may need some solid knowledge first, so that you can judge what the AI gives you. They also saw that experienced lawyers used the AI’s answers as something to check and argue with.

What’s the catch?

• The sample was small: 133 lawyers, all doing one kind of work.
• It lasted three months, and AI tools have changed since.
• The people were professionals. Nobody knows yet if students behave the same way.

Try it

This test is our idea, not the paper’s. Pick a short task, such as a paragraph or a small program. Do it once with AI. A week later, do a similar task with no AI. Ask a friend to mark both against the same list of points, without knowing which was which.

If the second one is much weaker, the AI helped the work and not you. Then try doing the first draft yourself and using AI only to check it.

Sources

• Does AI Assistance Enhance or Erode Expertise? Evidence from a Three-Month Field Experiment in Patent Drafting, Autor and others, NBER Working Paper 35720, 2026
• Does better work always mean better workers?, Google Research, 7 October 2026
• Paper page with abstract, Google Research