Was Vermeer Cheating?

I read something by Simon Sinek recently. Not about leadership for once. About Vermeer.

Yes, the 17th century Dutch painter. The one who captured light like nobody else. We spent 400 years calling him a genius with a brush.

Except a theory eventually surfaced. Vermeer may have used an optical device. A lens, a mirror, something to reach a precision that is frankly hard to get freehand.

One guy decided to check. Tim Jenison, an inventor, not even a painter. He rebuilt the tool, shut himself away for months, and ended up painting a near-perfect copy of a Vermeer.

There’s a documentary about it, Tim’s Vermeer. I haven’t watched it yet, and it came out in 2013, so I’m hardly ahead of the curve here. Sinek’s piece is what led me to it, thirteen years later. But the story grabbed me right away.

The reaction was fairly unanimous:

Ah. So he was cheating.

I’ll be honest, my first reflex was the same. A small pang. Like, oh, that’s less impressive than I thought.

Then it hit me that the painting hadn’t changed. It’s exactly what it was four centuries ago. Same light, same composition, same silence.

What changed is how we look at it.

We credit the talent we can see

Here’s what interests me in this.

A painting shows the brushwork. It doesn’t show the six months spent deciding what to paint. It doesn’t show the choice of window, the wait for the right light, the twenty framings thrown out.

So we credit the hand. It’s the only part of the work we can watch happening.

The day we learn that hand might have been assisted, it feels like nothing is left. Because we never counted the rest.

I’ll let you guess what this reminds me of.

Did you use Copilot or Claude for this?

I hear it a lot. And there’s almost always something in the tone. It’s rarely a real question, it’s an assessment.

We reward visible effort

Take two people facing the same problem.

The first spends ten hours on it. It shows. You watch them work, you feel the effort, you find them dedicated.

The second settles it in twenty minutes, because they’ve seen this problem thirty times and knew exactly what to ask the tool.

Guess which one comes across as more serious.

A deliverable produced in twenty minutes by someone with twenty years of experience isn’t cheating. It’s twenty years plus twenty minutes.

Except we don’t see the twenty years. Same as the choice of window in a Vermeer.

We’ve seen this movie before

The calculator didn’t kill mathematicians. Excel didn’t wipe out accountants, it created the financial controller. CAD didn’t replace engineers.

Every time, the tool moved where the value sits. It didn’t remove it.

What’s different this time is the speed. We had twenty years to digest the spreadsheet. We’ve had roughly twenty months for language models.

Our evaluation criteria haven’t had twenty months to adjust. They’re from before.

What that looks like in practice

We measure speed, when speed has become free. We applaud volume, when any model produces fifty pages in thirty seconds. We ask “how long did that take you?” when the real question is “how did you know that was the right thing to do?”

I wrote elsewhere that producing content and deciding what deserves to be said are two different jobs. This piece is the corollary: if we keep evaluating the first job, we’ll lose the people doing the second.

Organizations that invest heavily in technology without investing in their people’s judgment will produce, faster, content nobody took the time to think through. Then they’ll wonder why the transformation isn’t taking.

Back to Vermeer

He may well have used a lens. Probably did, in fact.

But someone decided where to put it. Which scene was worth painting. Where to cut the frame. Which light to wait for, and how long.

That’s expertise. And it was never a given.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean everything should be done with AI. There are things I still refuse to hand it, and knowing which ones is part of the job.

But how we see value is going to shift. It already has.

I’ll get around to watching that documentary. If you beat me to it, write and tell me what you thought. I’m curious whether your first reflex is the same as mine.

Have a good week!