The process diary for design 2 reads: hand 5h03m, AI assist 2h12m. The classificador will tag this 70:30. Lina has been watching these numbers for eleven minutes, which the time-lapse rig also captured, which means tomorrow's compressed footage will hold approximately 1.1 seconds of a woman not moving at her desk that looks like a freeze frame but is not.
Design 1 was 78:22. She remembers the pride. She had not expected to feel pride about a ratio, the way you do not expect to feel pride about your cholesterol results, and yet there it was. 78:22 said: mostly me. The number was a sentence with a subject.
Now the subject has shifted eight points and the process diary logged every minute of the shift without comment. This is the diary's function. It does not editorialize. It does not say 70:30 is worse than 78:22, or that design 2 looks better than design 1, which it does, in ways Lina can enumerate with professional precision: the color transitions where the AI suggested cadmium-to-ochre gradients she would not have reached for at this speed, the shadow treatment on the third panel where the blending algorithm found a subtlety her hand mixing would have taken another forty minutes to achieve. The pontuação de confiança on design 1 came back 0.81, high for mixed media. Design 2 will score lower. The score does not measure quality. The score measures the proportion of process steps the C2PA pipeline can attribute to a human origin point. Quality and attribution sit on different axes. The market pretends they share one. The market is wrong, but the market is also the one paying.
Rua Viva's marketing team posted the design 1 time-lapse as a test reel yesterday. 847 views in 14 hours. The brand's best-performing single piece this quarter.
Lina learned this from an email subject line: GREAT NEWS — PROCESS CONTENT OUTPERFORMING PRODUCT CONTENT.
She decided not to open the email for several hours. She opened it eventually. She is a professional. The body contained a graph with engagement metrics overlaid on a timeline of their product posts. The process reel outperformed their actual streetwear campaign photos by a factor of 2.3. The creative director had highlighted this with a yellow annotation: the making is the product now.
The comments on the reel split roughly in half: people discussing the illustration and people discussing the number. Someone screengrabbed the frame where the ratio overlay appears, the C2PA-generated badge that reads processo assistido: 78% humano / 22% máquina, and turned it into a meme template. The format is two panels where you fill in anything. 78% of my cooking is real food / 22% is the fire department. 78% of therapy is talking / 22% is the drive home. The illustration underneath the meme is Lina's third-best piece this year. The illustration is not the point of the meme.
Her trabalho is visible. Her trabalho is the background. Both true. She still uses the Portuguese word in her head because work in English lost its weight somewhere around the time every platform started calling engagement work too.
The Selo de Processo group chat has been active since midnight. Beatriz published the full specification yesterday under CC BY-SA 4.0: selo-de-processo v0.2, the documentation framework that records creative decisions at the point of making, not at the point of audit. Open-sourced because SortLayer's legal team sent a cease-and-desist claiming conceitos proprietários over the idea of process documentation, and Beatriz understood that the only defense against ownership claims was to make ownership impossible. Four stars on the repository already. A clone running in Porto Alegre. Someone in Recife opened an issue asking about ceramic workflows.
Kenji posted photos from Saturday's PROVAS session: eleven portfolios spread across a folding table in his Liberdade studio, film negatives clipped to a clothesline strung between two light stands. The proof-of-process submissions for next month's Selo pilot: five photographers, three illustrators, two ceramicists, one printmaker. The negatives look beautiful in the photos. They also look like artifacts in a museum dedicated to a practice that ended recently enough for the practitioners to still be alive.
The classificador cannot read film negatives. Kenji's proof that the work is handmade exists in a format the verification system cannot parse. He considers this a feature. Lina is not sure he is wrong.
Seo-jin's community map went out last night. Twenty-three practitioners pinned across São Paulo, each tagged with practice type, documentation method, and whether they hold a selo-verificado badge or are self-declaring. Three pins in Vila Madalena. Lina is one. Her pin says: illustrator, process documentation, tier pricing. She chose those words. She did not write artist. She does not know if that was precision or surrender or whether the two have merged in a classificador economy where what you call yourself determines which trust index returns your name.
The Tier 3 contract with Rua Viva was built on an assumption she did not examine closely enough: the ratio would stay roughly stable. Hand work in the high seventies, machine assist in the low twenties. The pricing reflected this: 100% markup over standard illustration, because the client receives art plus time-lapse plus process diary plus material notes. When she wrote the rate sheet she described it to herself as art plus evidence plus confession.
The ratio did not stay stable. It moved eight points in one commission. Two designs. The process diary recorded the movement because that is what the diary does. And now Lina faces a problem nobody else in the Sorted certification economy has encountered, because nobody else has documented their own practice this completely: the evidence she sells is evidence of her own increasing reliance on the tools she is documenting.
The one-way door. She sold transparency. She cannot un-document. She cannot stop the time-lapse mid-session when the AI tool produces something better than what she would have mixed by hand, because stopping it would show in the footage: a gap, a cut, a moment where the documenter chose not to document. The Selo framework calls this a lacuna declarada: a declared gap in the process record. Declared gaps reduce your pontuação de confiança. The system Beatriz designed to protect artists from the classificador has its own internal classification, its own scoring, its own sorting mechanism. The sorted are being sorted by their own shelter.
Lina reaches for the Rua Viva contract. The printed copy sits on the desk under a coffee ring and two Pigma Micron 005 pens, the fine-tip ones she uses for detail work that the AI color tool never touches. She turns the contract over.
She writes, in pencil: 60%.
This is the floor. Minimum sixty percent hand work for any Tier 3 commission.
Not because the art requires it. Design 2 demonstrates that it does not, that 70:30 produces stronger color work than 78:22 in the time available. Not because the client asked. Rua Viva's creative director is in love with the ratio as content regardless of which direction it moves. The making is the product now. He would be equally delighted by 50:50 if the diary were honest about it. Not because the Selo de Processo framework specifies a threshold. Beatriz left that out of v0.2 deliberately, because she understood that a specific number would become a target and targets become ceilings and ceilings become the new definition of enough.
The floor is for Lina.
Below sixty percent the process diary stops recording an artist using tools and starts recording tools assisted by an artist. She knows this distinction exists only in her head. The classificador does not draw this line. The three-tier system, processo humano, processo assistido, processo gerado, draws its line elsewhere, using metadata analysis, not the artist's private sense of who is driving. C2PA tags every layer. HumanMade Verify, which costs $2,400 a year and which she decided against, would certify the absence of the problem for six times what the tools that cause the problem cost. The pontuação de confiança would give design 2 a lower score than design 1, which means the better illustration ranks lower in the trust index, which means a client searching by quality and a client searching by process-verified would find different pieces and never know they were looking at the same artist.
The line is hers. It lives in pencil on the back of a contract because pencil can be erased and Lina does not trust herself not to erase it someday when a project needs the extra twelve percent and the tool can deliver and the diary will capture it and the client will celebrate it.
All floors are arbitrary. That is what makes them floors and not slopes.
She puts the contract back under the coffee ring. The pens go on top. Outside, Vila Madalena does its Saturday evening: bass from a bar on Rua Aspicuelta, someone arguing about parking in a voice that carries three floors up, the clatter of a metal shutter coming down on the boutique that closes at six. The air carries street food and the heaviness of rain that has not arrived. Her phone shows another notification from the Rua Viva marketing thread. She leaves it.
The time-lapse is still recording. Eleven minutes of stillness followed by the pencil, followed by this: Lina at her desk, looking at the contract, then the window, then the screen where the diary is open and the cursor blinks at the bottom of today's entry.
She types: Design 2. Hand: 5h03m. AI assist: 2h12m. Ratio 70:30. Higher machine involvement than D1. Color results stronger across panels 2-4. Process diary growing: material notes section added per client request. Pontuação estimated 0.72-0.76. The transparency is working. The transparency is also documenting a trend I have not decided how to feel about. Both things.
She does not type the number on the back of the contract. The diary records the practice. The pencil records the limit. These are not the same document. They are not for the same audience.
She saves. She closes the laptop.
She opens it again because the time-lapse needs to be stopped manually and the rig has been recording this entire negotiation with herself, which means somewhere in tomorrow's compressed footage there will be 1.1 seconds of Lina turning over a contract, and whoever watches will not know what she wrote on the back.
That is the point. That is the floor. The part the documentation cannot reach.