For a piece of work, “Effort is more and more a proxy for Value, separate from the actual Quality of the work.”

I think people - unconsciously - now feel “if it didn’t take any time or struggle to make, then it doesn’t have value.” Previously, people could (or thought they could) look at an advert, movie, essay, poem, photograph, song, illustration, line of code etc. and make a mental calculation on the effort it took to create. And now it’s much harder (and will be impossible, I think, in the next couple years) to look at something and quickly know the effort and struggle some human went through to make it.

Some brands (intuitively?) understand this (like Apple TV’s Logo animation, behind the scenes where they show all the panes of glass being shot on a set. The ident could absolutely have been done all CG.)

As a result, I think that increasingly we need to create “making of” videos on ALL our work – esp AI work – to show the effort required to get something great. The “making of” story is now integral to how the work is perceived.

Audiences want to know you care about them.