AI Freezes The Scholarly Voice

I recently attended a workshop about how law professor are using AI. One professor said that he has trained AI on his writing style by reviewing all of his past publications. Thus, any text generated by the AI will be in the same sort of style that the professor has–or perhaps had.

Law professors will often research in certain areas of the law, but across all categories, they write with a particular approach called a scholarly voice. Many junior professors struggle with developing their own voice. Indeed, I would wager that for most scholars, their voice changes over the years. For sure, my voice has changed substantially since I started teaching in 2012. And that’s a good thing.

What does AI do to this process? Perhaps established professors have a corpus of writings to train AI, but newbies do not. How are developing writers supposed to build their own voice if AI has nothing to train on? I suppose the obvious reply is that junior scholars should not use AI. But I would wager that the youngest writers are likely the most tech savvy, and may have even started using this tech in the earliest years of their practice. Soon enough, all people on the hiring market will have come of age with AI in law school. And they will never have a chance to develop their own voice without a helpful agent to assist. Their entire body of work will be a byproduct of AI.

This fact will necessarily affect how law schools hire and grant tenure. Perhaps professors should be asked to describe exactly how they use AI in their scholarship. But I am not confident this inquiry will prove much. Ultimately, we should just presume that nearly everything written was aided by AI, unless a professor affirmatively states it was written old school. And with that presumption in place, I struggle to measure how much the professor actually brings to the scholarly inquiry. We will just end up rewarding whoever can coach their agents the best. Scholarly creativity will give way to law coding.