Do you believe in 'hard work'?

Visible effort was always a proxy for value. AI removes it.

In 1998, two music producers built one of the strangest vocal sounds anyone had heard, then lied about how they’d done it.

The song was Cher’s “Believe”. The effect was Auto-Tune, pushed so hard the voice turned robotic. Asked how they’d done it, Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling said they’d used a vocoder. They hadn’t. Back then, tuning a voice was still treated as cheating - a producer’s dirty little secret - so they kept the real method to themselves for years.

A decade later it was on hit after hit. What they’d hidden had become the sound everyone wanted.

That’s roughly where work is now.

Given time, we make our peace with what once felt like cheating. What grates is the in-between, when the work is obviously easier and we haven’t yet agreed that’s allowed.

So what are we really objecting to? I don’t think it’s the tool. It’s the missing effort.

Judging the sweat

Two Harvard researchers, Ryan Buell and Michael Norton, found that people value a service more when they can watch it working. A travel site that pauses to show you it's “searching hundreds of airlines” is preferred to one that returns the same results instantly.

They called it the labour illusion.

Companies now build in those delays on purpose, because visible effort makes us rate the result more highly. We are, it turns out, reassured by the sight of a machine pretending to work. We still judge the work itself. But we also judge the sweat we can see went into it, and we read that as proof of skill and care. And as proof of value.

Which is awkward, because AI removes the visible sweat.

Looking lazy

I saw this a couple of years ago, when helping teams bring AI into their work. I went in expecting to talk about tools, but the interesting conversations were about something else.

Most people held back from talking about their AI habits because being seen to use AI felt like admitting they couldn’t do the job without it.

It was a reputation thing. And they were right to expect the judgement.

Last year, researchers at Duke’s Fuqua School ran four experiments with more than four thousand people. Their participants rated the workers who’d used AI as lazier, less competent and less diligent than those who’d used other kinds of help, or none at all.

Of course, some AI use is lazy. But here, the workers didn't have to do anything worse to be judged that way - knowing AI was involved was enough. What they were really penalising was the missing effort.

But this just exposes a deeper, longer lasting problem: effort was only ever a proxy for value.

We can’t see the quality of someone’s thinking, so we look for the most visible signal we can - the hours, the late nights, the visible grind. But sitting at a desk all day doesn’t prove good work. It proves you sat at a desk all day.

And using AI neither makes you lazy nor especially innovative. AI might do in twenty minutes what once took two days, or burn an afternoon getting nowhere. Either way, the time it took tells you nothing about whether the thinking holds up or the problem got solved.

It didn’t matter, in the end, that Cher’s voice was auto-tuned. What mattered was that people loved the song.

In other words - forget how it was made. Is the work any good?

Thanks for reading.

Ollie

Ollie on Work is a weekly newsletter about what I’m learning from building with AI, advising leadership teams, and trying to bridge the gap between what technology can do and how businesses actually work. If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe here: