Proof of Effort

The past few years, AI is becoming a real issue. This statement is generally true, yes, but especially for the creative areas in which I work. I’ve tried to teach myself how to draw and design for years, and now I can just visit any website and get something that probably looks fancier in less time. I’ve written millions of words and published 20+ books, but now all those marketplaces are being flooded by AI-generated novels. Basically everything I do can now partially be done with AI, and in response, the general publishers for that work have become either overwhelmed or incredibly strict.

So far, it seems I’ve been on the good side. Amazon, for example, has accepted all my books since the start. I have sometimes used AI imagery in the free board games I publish online, often combined with my own work, and so far there hasn’t been an angry mob outside my home holding pitchforks. (Also because that home has been in renovation for like three years now and everyone else in our town wrongly assumes that “nobody lives there”.)

This is not, however, an issue that will go away. It’s only getting worse. AI improves and becomes more accessible, some governments start to regulate it while others give free reign, and a new generation of creatives will soon enter the professional field with lots of skill in using AI and none of the skill behind it.

Politics has become all but meaningless. Election after election is decided by social media and digital manipulation. AI-generated messages, accounts and videos. Enough fake news to make enough people worry that anything they don’t want to hear is fake news.

Just today, I read in the newspaper how even more young girls develop eating disorders or depression. Because all they see online are these perfect bodies, usually edited or wholly AI-generated. All they see online are the successes of others, even though many of them use AI in some way to create that image.

And so, for the past year or so, I’ve been thinking about all this. Mainly, I considered two questions.

• How can I prove I am a person, I am not using AI, and thrive on staying a human creative?
• How do we combat all the bad stuff caused by others with the opposite intent—sow hate and misinformation, destroy marketplaces, devalue art even more, using AI?

After some time, it suddenly dawned on me that these two questions are not just related. The answer to them, the solution if you will, is the same thing. I call it proof of effort.

Everyone is focused on outcome

Nowadays, most of our society is focused on outcome. We only hear success stories, everything else is swept under the rug. People only post their prettiest pictures online, their best moments, and nothing else. We praise leaders of old who conquered many countries, while we forget much better leaders who were unlucky with their outcome.

And AI is nothing but a shortcut to a desired outcome.

You want to have written a book? Just ask AI! In five minutes, you have your own book!

You want to say you’re a designer and sell your own paintings? Just ask AI! Ten minutes and you’re an artist too!

You want to publish inspirational quotes to your Instagram every day? Just ask AI!

You want to have programmed your own app? Just ask AI!

People are focused on outcomes, and AI is the perfect tool for it. They want an image, information, text, code, and they know AI can just spit it out in a few minutes. And now they have their outcome, or something resembling it.

This is the lure of AI. This is why even skeptical people around me, or people who don’t do much digital work and aren’t on their devices much, jumped ship. A few years after the launch of ChatGPT, they suddenly start a conversation with me saying “Wow it’s so helpful actually, should’ve used it sooner, I’ve been using it for a few days now to write my thesis”.

While our society keeps rewarding outcome, more and more will flock to AI. Until everything made is just spit out by a computer; everything supposedly achieved is nothing more than the imagination of a large language model. Until we’re caught in this weird cycle of playing pretend about our own lives and skill, while also playing pretend that we don’t know others are faking it too.

Because we’re so, so, so focused on outcome.

We don’t care how a product is made. We don’t care that people in China died for it, that a forest burned for it, that the company’s CEO is corrupt. All we care about is a cheap product delivered to our doorstep, right? That’s the outcome. We only look at that.

We don’t care that our favorite influencer is going through hell to provide the perfect pictures. How unhappy they are with selling their soul to advertise another beauty product, or how many relationships they’ve ruined because of their obsession with always being online. We care about getting a funny video from them at the end of our day, right? That’s the outcome. We only look at that.

We don’t care about the research or logic behind some statement. We don’t care that some politician pulls it out of their arse, or that the data was willfully misinterpreted. We only care that we read a statement and we agree (or it makes us angry), right? That’s the outcome. We only like that.

Or let’s keep it closer to home. My entire life, whenever I’ve talked to someone about my creative work or ideas, they always ask the same things.

• “So is the book already finished? Can I read it?”
• “But how are you going to earn money from that?”
• -cuts me off- “Oh well just show it when you’re done”
• -I reveal a 1st draft of something, explicitly stating it’s just a rough attempt that will be refined- “Maybe you should give up being a singer, Tiamo”

Everyone only cares about the outcome. When successful, they either celebrate you or envy you. (Usually both, one in public and one in secret.) When a failure, they turn away and pretend you did nothing of value.

Those failed first attempts at books are the whole reason I’m a much better writer now than ten years ago. Those experiments I’ve always done, many a failure, are the reason I got my best ideas and learned so much.

But nobody cares. They tell me to stop being so honest, to stop sharing everything, to stop showing every side of working as a creative. This is not a joke! Friends, family, even strangers tell me it’s obviously stupid for marketing. They say that sharing the hardship of trying to figure out some novel I’m writing is “pessimistic” and “doesn’t make people want to buy your books”.

It doesn’t matter how often I tell people the terrible truth behind how some of their products are made. Or the fact that Apple charges them a premium for delivering subpar products. Or that buying and shipping several individual products every day is terrible for the climate. Nobody cares—they only care about the outcome, and that’s a shiny piece of status they can hold in their hands.

I’ll say it again: our society is based on outcome only, and AI is like the devil whispering in your ear “I can give you everything you want, in just a few minutes …”

But outcome is useless

How outcome is determined

Now, you might think this is only reasonable.

People want to be pretty, and rich, and successful. Those are outcomes, or goals, and people can strive for that. We should celebrate other people who attain these goals, as it’s evidence of their competence and hard work … right?

No, of course not!

Most successful people agree that luck plays a large part in that success, in all the ways you can define luck. Luck with their genes, luck with their family, luck with the right time right place, luck with how they got away with that one scandal, etcetera.

Then you have privilege. If you’re born in a wealthy family, with connections, you’re basically guaranteed a spot at the top. Talent, competence or hard work are completely irrelevant. It’s no secret that many “influencers” are young women born in relative wealth who could afford to take meticulous care of their beauty routine and control their life to present the perfect outward image. Anybody with less money to their name is, you know, actually working and then too tired to talk.

Only then do you get to effort (and a little bit of talent, if you will). There have been projects where I feel I took all the right steps, where I made the right choices and picked very promising ideas, and it just … didn’t work out. Luck wasn’t on my side. I lacked resources to take the project to the next level. Effort and skill be damned.

As such, most “good outcomes” are either simply fortuitous or the result of someone who worked really hard to control those outcomes. At all costs. Story after story broke the news the past decades about people abusing power, abusing others, being absolutely impossible to work with, because they were so focused on outcome that they had to achieve it at all costs. We have built a society of people who would gladly walk over fellow humans in their way to get to some specific outcome they want.

And it’s not even a guarantee.

Outcomes are unpredictable. You might get very unlucky tomorrow. You might do your best to live healthy, be strong, be pretty, and then you get hit by a bus. You can’t predict the future, no matter how much you try to control all outcomes.

Even worse, desirable outcomes are unpredictable. For example, when I grew up, having published a book meant something. It was a big deal. Good job! Nowadays, so few people read, and so many people have thrown their first attempt at a novel online, that its value has been diluted. My immense writing effort the past ten years, publishing 20+ books, has been met with a collective “eh” by those around me. (We’re nearing territory of “Yeah, well, tell me when you’ve written a REAL BOOK and sold a million copies.”)

You make it a zero-sum game

What does that mean?

It means everyone is striving so hard to reach something that is unpredictable and potentially meaningless by the time they reach it. And to get there, we destroy everything in our path.

That kid who once dreamed of becoming this talented painter and creating beautiful things people would gladly place in their home … now turns to AI to generate something passable in 5 minutes and dejectedly puts it on their Instagram hoping for likes.

That kid who once dreamed of writing fantastical and fun worlds, like the Harry Potter books that taught him to read, almost cannot resist the temptation to just let AI turn his nuggets of ideas into full novels and publish all that to show off.

Yes, obviously, that kid is me. I’m human too. I am very much influenced by the society in which I grew up (and still live, of course). Having been told that I need success, and income, and hundreds of published books to show off, I sometimes feel I should become more outcome-focused too. Here I am, slaving away writing 5,000 words a day on this very unique idea. With immense effort, I publish ~6 books a year. While others publish 20 and the money trickling in from that garbage is still more than I make.

But I have something they don’t.

I know how destructive and counter-productive this outcome-based thinking is. I know I don’t get real satisfaction from it. I know I don’t want to be on my death bed looking back at how I didn’t do anything with my life and only let AI publish garbage books in my name.

If you only consider outcome, you will be disappointed most of the time. You will not be satisfied. And you will destroy everything else in the process of … maybe getting a little bit of satisfaction from showing off a successful outcome?

By design, outcome-based thinking will reward the few on top, while everyone else keeps striving and grinding to never reach it. Think about it. That influencer can only make money as long as there are wide-eyed girls following her, thinking they don’t look as pretty, buying the beauty products she recommends. That politician can only stay in power and sound convincing as long as there’s something wrong in the world and people feel maltreated. When outcomes are all you care about, and outcomes are mutually exclusive, then you’re basically gambling on you (and half the population with you) getting their dream life or suffering until you die.

As I like to say,

“If everyone actually reached their dream outcome, there would be nobody left to take advantage of on your way there.”

A zero-sum game. One person’s happy outcome most likely means another person doesn’t reach it. And if that’s all you care about—the goal, not the journey—then yes, you will be very unhappy.

Same with optimization

I focus on outcome here, but it’s really the same as performance or optimization.

Those are the main targets of our civilization.

We want things to be faster all the time. Trains should move faster and arrive more frequently, that will solve all our problems. Packages should arrive at our doorstep the same day, because we obviously can’t wait a single day for that new shirt I bought!

We want everything to be easier. We want to be able to have written a book without actually putting in time and effort. We want to be able to sit on our couch and yell at Alexa to do something, even though we could do it ourselves with five seconds of effort.

But do we really want that? Is that even the right thing to focus on?

When people express dislike for the train, research shows, it’s actually for different reasons. They dislike trains because of unpredictable delays or lack of comfort while inside the train.

When access to information is so fast and easy, the only result is that people don’t actually memorize the information. (It’s why I’ve written several articles about embracing that things take effort and time, because it helps our brain and body memorize and understand something better.)

When creating art is so fast and easy, it gives you actually no satisfaction to create it. (And the quality might suffer too, but that’s outcome-based thinking again.)

Most people approach every problem with the mind-set of “optimization”, and that’s just a subset of outcome-based thinking. You look at a problem, and you think “should optimize outcome”, so you search ways to make numbers go up.

I hope you can already see the similarities. When you only care about “number go up”, you will do so at all costs. You will disregard better solutions, or actual solutions, just to optimize that number. Because this specific outcome is all you care about!

And then, through the complexities of life, and a bit of bad luck, that number goes down. And you are extremely disappointed, feeling it’s the end of the world, maybe losing your job. Even though … “number go down”, in this situation, might actually have been a very good thing.

My views on AI

Having said this, I can reveal my personal stance on AI. Because I’m not ferociously against it for no reason. I’m a programmer and scientist myself, I see the many applications and advantages of it, and I am first and foremost a big proponent of freedom and experimentation. Which includes the freedom to use AI and to experiment with what such a system might mean.

Like most, I see it as a great tool, if used well and in specific circumstances. As stated, I have used it myself, played with it. Every time, however, I returned to doing everything myself anyway.

Why?

Because there is just no satisfaction in the creative work anymore. AI makes the work so optimized … that it becomes LESS fun, and LESS valuable. Another example of why optimizing outcomes isn’t necessarily what you want to do in most cases. Creative work is valuable and fun precisely because it is challenging, while it expresses what’s in my heart. The effort put in, the struggle, the battling with my own thoughts about a topic (such as when writing this article), those are what make the work worthwhile.

And this isn’t just a personal stance. Everyone around me has the same attitude towards AI: “You can tell. There’s no soul behind it. If they don’t bother putting in the work to make it, why would I bother paying the money to buy it?”

There’s a strong feeling, present in most humans, that effort makes things more valuable. In the world of video games, the length and effort it took to create a game is often mentioned in the marketing material. If someone made a video game on their own, for ten years, that’s an amount of effort that we commend. That makes us believe the game must be very valuable. Not necessarily good, but valuable. It’s something we want to check out and play, because another human put so much effort into it. Put their heart and soul into it.

I have that feeling too. I can see it in the people most likely to buy or enjoy my work. The value of creative work is not solely the outcome, but is very much influenced by the effort it took to get there. When you visit a museum, the real interesting bit is not looking at some ancient stone carving that vaguely resembles a regular face—no, it’s the rich history of that artefact and the journey it took to get here.

And so, after years of back and forth, I settled on that. I only use AI when it replaces some part of the process that I just can’t do (or really really dislike), and when the replacement isn’t so large that people start saying there’s no heart and soul left in my work.

When I stand behind my desk at 9 in the morning, struggling to write chapter 11 of this tangled-up fantasy novel, I remind myself of that. The effort I put in is the important part. The outcome is out of my control anyway, and only part of the equation in whether people will buy/enjoy this book. And so my wi-fi stays off, I rely fully on my own imagination, and I try my best.

I feel civilization would be happier, more productive, and less competitive and destructive if everyone switched to that mind-set.

Switch to focusing on Effort

Okay. What to do now? How to fix this? What’s a better system, or collective mind-set I suppose?

Let’s return to my first question. How do I keep proving I’m a human? How do I slap a label “no lazy AI trickery here” on my (paid) work? (While also managing the question of copyright, if that ever becomes an issue?)

Well, by showing the receipts.

I have the diary with day-to-day actions, remarks and struggles related to the work. You can verify these with the actual work. AI can’t write these, certainly not in my writing style and while including, say, personal struggles in real life.

I have the individual files, the layers, the different iterations. The many PDF files with “v0.9”, “v0.91”, “v0.92-final”, etcetera ;)

I have my personal oddities. I often write about topics that AIs deem too political or unsafe to even consider. I care deeply about certain things because of how they shaped my real life, and that will show through my work. I write personal forewords/afterwords in basically all my books, being as honest and human as possible, because that is what matters and what makes it different from AI.

In other words, I put effort into showing the effort.

• Some time ago, I open-sourced all my major coding projects (mostly my six big websites). You can literally see the entire code behind it, and it tracks the history of updates.
• I’ve always written in-depth diaries for all projects which are freely available online. (I always want to publish these the same day the project launches, but I often forget that …)
• In the near future, I will launch an online store where I sell the entire source of projects. So you can not only see the individual layers, notes, files, techniques, but also use and modify them yourself. (In a way, this seemed a good blend of making a bit of money from otherwise free projects, as well as keeping a nice archive of all that work.)

I intend to stay as open, public, and sharing as I have always been. Showing the receipts. Knowing it takes me extra effort, and it increases the risk of others stealing things or abusing it.

And, obviously, I propose everyone else does the same.

We need to move there anyways. Companies are researching ways to build “proof of labor” into images and documents.

More than ever, people need to be able to distinguish between real news and fake news. Between a picture that really happened, and one generated by AI.

Signatures can be faked. AI is already convincing enough in many cases. Most people don’t have common sense, unfortunately. (Which makes it … uncommon sense?)

And so the only solution, I feel, is to embed proof of effort into everything. To require proof of effort at all times. To focus on people working hard and doing interesting stuff, instead of people only posting fake outcomes.

I want to see failures, damn it!

I want influencers to post what they did that day, and how it all failed, and they were tired, so no video today guys.

I want politicians to be required to do everything out in the open. If they’re discussing anything related to how to govern me, then all of that, and I mean all of it, should be accessible for me. Even if it fails. Even if politicians said some dumb stuff at the start of a debate.

Normalize it. Normalize that we’re all humans, sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding.

I want celebrations of effort, not outcome. I want a National Failure Day, where we recount all the people who made an attempt but for whatever reason fell on their face. And we do so with a smile and a congratulations, for they proved their effort.

Anybody who tries their best is rewarded for it. Anybody who only shows an outcome and mysteriously lost the receipts is ignored into oblivion. It’s useless. We can’t do anything with only an outcome! It might have been because of luck, it might be fake, it might not be repeatable. What good is that?

How does that work in practice?

In the case of government documents, for example, it might be something like this.

• Every single edit of the document is distributed, not just the document itself.
• Perhaps it’s required that all work on official documents must be done with witnesses around, or during the actual debate about the topic (which is filmed/is always in the same room/etcetera). Just to create a long, big trail of effort taken to create this final document.
• This means people can read back exactly how it changed. Who added what, and when, and how. With a bit of research, people can easily figure out if this is a real document or just some convincing fake by someone else.

In the case of pictures, for example, a start would be the following.

• The photographer also makes sure their location, camera, settings, etcetera is tracked when they make a picture.
• Any edits made to the picture afterwards are saved into the file too, or otherwise distributed.
• (Any tampering or deletion of this info gives a big red flashing sign saying “NO PROOF OF EFFORT!” :p Both on your computer, as well as on your social media account when you post the image.)

The idea is that we normalize creating a history or a trail of effort. From that effort, the outcome is obvious anyway. And when more effort is put into it, the outcome is revised/edited anyway.

This makes it near impossible to easily spread fake news, fake pictures, only the highlights of your life, etcetera. You simply won’t get a book published if it has no proof of effort.

It also encourages tracking effort, celebrating it, showing it publicly. Now, that influencer who tries to show how glamorous her life is, has to also reveal the trail of events and hardships that led to that sunset picture on the beach. Now, anybody who publishes a book, has to reveal the many edits and cuts and typing, removing, retyping, removing as they had doubts about a specific line.

And yes, you can still fake that. You can obviously let AI write a book, then copy-paste different parts at different times, rewrite some random sentences, and create a short trail of effort that way. But that takes effort! That’s the whole friggin’ point! Now it takes too much effort to let AI generate a book. Most will be put off by it; others will actually just write it themselves.

We should be quite generous on this “proof of effort”, of course. That should not be an issue, though. The gap between “I just happened to write this book quickly and copy-pasted my work from other sources” and “I pressed a button and let AI generate the whole thing” is massive. It’s very easy to see. I don’t feel there will be that many false positives or negatives here.

For example, right now, most of my board games only have a diary. Maybe, if the board game is generated on my website, it also has a short history in the GitHub repository with the code. Not a very large or verifiable trail of effort. But an article of 5,000 words, showing in-progress pictures, talking about very specific problems and how I solved them, written with completely unique sentences and ideas related only to this project … you just can’t fake that easily :p And it falls apart under any scrutiny otherwise.

Conclusion

I sincerely hope people start focusing on effort, not outcome anymore. Only follow people who show their effort, both failures and successes, as openly as possible. When you present anything, also present the effort it took to acquire/create that information and publish it.

If you don’t provide proof of effort, then I hope people will just turn away. Can’t be trusted. Doesn’t mean anything then. All flash, no substance.

If you focus on effort, you won’t chase pipe dreams your entire life. It won’t be a guarantee that most of our population will be disappointed and never achieve the things they dream about. Because the only thing you can control, is how much effort you put in every day. You can’t fully control your looks, or the quality of your book, or how many likes you will get. You can only control the effort you put into doing something.

Let’s normalize showing that effort. Requiring proof of effort before accepting, believing or celebrating anything. Refuse to give someone an award until they reveal the details of how they made their amazing movie! Refuse to believe anything a politician says until they show the receipts! Donate to a struggling creative not because you want or like any of their products, but to support the effort, the attempts! :p

Many don’t seem to realize that this goes both ways.

Yes, you need to be supportive of others despite them failing or not reaching some fun outcome.

But it also means others will be supportive of you when everything fails and you don’t get the outcome you want.

The only thing that matters is doing. Putting in the effort. If someone close to you writes a book, commend them for the effort, outcome irrelevant. If your child shows you a drawing, commend them for the effort, no remarks about your perceived quality of it.

I will be putting in that effort and revealing all of it, behind every project, as much as I can. Until we have solid systems or agreed-upon standard for “proof of effort”, my method is the best I have. (Open source what I can, keep versions/notes/diaries, be honest and transparent especially on failures or struggles.)

And I will never follow, believe or celebrate anyone who only shows outcomes. I don’t care how many copies your book sold—did you actually write it yourself? I don’t care that you earn a lot of money, or that you don’t, what things did you try? Tell me interesting stories of your failures. Write good diaries about your trial and error. So we might all learn from the mistakes and build a better tomorrow.

I propose this becomes the new standard.

Those were my thoughts,

Tiamo