Becoming "AI pilled"

I came across the term ‘AI pilled’ recently and it sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. (TLDR on the definition: becoming a “believer” in AI, with a level of confidence that can look exaggerated from the outside.)

My theory is that one potential trigger point for this shift is when AI helps someone get past a specific challenge they personally care about.

I see it as a sort of “perceived boost” someone gets from interacting with the tool, and the reason it varies so much from person to person is that it’s highly baseline dependent.

For a newbie, that bottleneck is usually access. A tool like Claude Design might feel magical to someone without design experience, but it's usefulness might not be obvious to an expert, because they are measuring against different baselines.

The person who could not prioritise designing before, but really wanted to, and felt like they were on the outside looking in can now turn an idea into something tangible. And that in itself is a highly emotional response.

Because we are susceptible to extending emotional experiences into broader theories about society, even people you wouldn’t expect are now coming back saying that AI is going to change the world.

And because that has not been proven yet, it can give the impression of overconfidence. (which is how a lot of disruptive ideas look like first, which makes things even more confusing)

But those who are testing AI in a domain they are already very familiar with experience a different bottleneck. They don’t have to deal with the access problem. They usually test the tools on whether they can be trusted, controlled, deployed and maintained.

Being an expert also gives you a hyperawareness of the edge cases of your own domain. That overconfidence you see in others can be merely be a combination of excitement + lack of awareness of those edge cases + generalisation. We get the ability to create faster outputs, but we do not necessarily get the ability to evaluate those outputs.

So maybe being “AI pilled” is not always about truly believing in the technology in some abstract, world changing sense, after having mapped every industry, edge case, and permutation.

Sometimes it is just someone having a strong emotional response to a problem that's been bothering them for a while, and taking that as evidence of a much larger shift.

And while things are still playing out, it is hard to know whether this is over excitement, luck, or someone genuinely seeing something early.