Becoming "AI pilled"

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about what is actually happening when someone becomes “AI pilled”.

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

We can think about 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 threshold is usually access. A tool like Claude Design might feel magical to someone without design experience, but the utility might not be obvious to an expert, because they are measuring different deltas.

The person who could not design before, but wanted to, and felt like they were on the outside looking in can turn an idea into something tangible. And that’s a highly emotional response.

And I think that’s one of the main reasons why even people you weren’t expecting it from are now coming back to you and saying that AI is going to change the world, because they are extending that emotional response and abstracting that first experience into a broader theory about society.

And because that has not been proven yet, it can give the impression of overconfidence.

People who are using 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 the output can be trusted, controlled and integrated.

Being an expert also gives you a hyperawareness of the edge cases and failure modes of your own domain. That overconfidence you see in others can be a combination of excitement + lack of awareness of those edge cases + generalisation. AI gives people the ability to create outputs, but it doesn’t equally give them the ability to evaluate those outputs.

So maybe being “AI pilled” is not always about believing in the technology in some abstract, world changing sense.

Sometimes it is someone having a strong emotional response to a personal bottleneck being crossed, 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. The market excitement around AI makes that even harder, because it is difficult to separate the actual idea from the noise around it.