When Law Professors prefer AI
No matter how much academy defend human creativity, it will have to deal with the powerful convenience of AI
A new Stanford-led study on legal education puts its finger on one of the central facts of the AI age: when a new technology becomes not only powerful but dramatically convenient, moral resistance by itself will not stop it.
The researchers asked sixteen U.S. law professors to create and evaluate short-answer tutoring responses in contracts. In blinded comparisons, the professors preferred the AI-generated answers over those of their peers by a wide margin, with average AI win rates around 75 percent. The models were also flagged as harmful less often than the human responses. This was not in a domain with one obvious right answer, but in a judgment-rich field where reasoning, ambiguity, and defensible conclusions matter.
That is why the paper matters so much. It is not simply another demonstration that AI can be fast or fluent. It suggests that in at least some educational contexts, AI is becoming the more attractive option even where human judgment was supposed to be the decisive advantage. Once that happens, convenience becomes a civilizational force.
Students will want the tool that is always available, clear, cheap, patient, and apparently excellent. Institutions under pressure will want the tool that scales. Professors themselves may begin to rely on the tool that performs at or above the level of many colleagues. That is how technological revolutions actually happen: not only because something is possible, but because it becomes hard to refuse.
From a Catholic perspective, this is exactly why simply restating principles, though indispensable, is not enough. Yes, we must keep saying that the human person is not reducible to information, that education is formation rather than mere delivery, and that judgment, wisdom, and moral responsibility cannot simply be outsourced. All of that is true. But history is littered with examples of societies that affirmed noble principles while still being swept along by convenience, efficiency, and institutional pressure.
The printing press, despite all the criticism from one of the most brilliant minds of the time, Johannes Trithemius, did not wait for a full theology of print. The factory did not pause until labor ethics had caught up. AI will not politely hold still while we repeat first principles, however true they are.
What is needed, then, is a stronger Catholic imagination about history: an ability to think concretely about what happens when a tool is obviously useful, socially desired, economically scalable, and increasingly hard to resist.
The question is no longer only, “What are our principles?” It is also, “What institutions, habits, rules, and forms of life can actually embody those principles under real pressure?” If AI tutors are this good already in one corner of higher education, then Catholics need more than critique. We need practical visions of education, work, law, authorship, and human formation that can survive the age of convenience without surrendering the human person to it.
That is the deeper lesson of this study. The challenge posed by AI is not just ethical in the abstract. It is historical. It forces us to confront how human beings actually behave when convenience becomes irresistible. A Catholic response worthy of the name must therefore be both principled and imaginative: firm in what it believes, but realistic enough to build for the world that is coming rather than the one that is passing away.