The “AI Effect”: Why We Always Move the Goalposts on Artificial Intelligence

We have all been there. You type a prompt into an advanced AI model, watch it generate a photorealistic image in seconds or write a working Python script from scratch, and think: “Whoa, we are living in the future.”

Yet, give it a few months, and that same technology stops feeling like magic. It becomes mundane. We stop marveling at the fact that a machine can translate languages instantly or beat grandmasters at chess, and instead, we start complaining about a minor typo or a slightly awkward hand in an AI-generated painting.

Welcome to the AI Effect.

What is the AI Effect?

Coined by computer scientist John McCarthy—one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence—the AI Effect describes a strange psychological and cultural phenomenon: As soon as an AI system succeeds in solving a complex problem, people stop considering it “real intelligence.”

Instead, we dismiss it as “just math,” “brute-force computation,” or an advanced automated calculator.