What it is
The AI effect is the habit of no longer counting a task as intelligence once a machine can do it. Chess, translation, recognizing faces: each was “real intelligence” until a computer did it, and then it was “just calculation.”
Larry Tesler put it this way around 1970: “Intelligence is whatever machines haven’t done yet.” Others later named it the AI effect, and the popular version, “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet,” is a slight misquote of him.
How it shows up for me
I caught myself doing exactly this in an argument, moving the goalposts every time a machine cleared one. There’s a name for what I was doing, apparently. Now I try to ask what I’d have said ten years ago, before I knew the answer.