It’s likely safe to say—creative accounting’s been around for as long as accounting itself. In 1494, for example, mathematician and ‘father of modern accounting’ Luca Pacioli wrote of Venetian merchants willfully rendering their ledgers illegible. In the Gilded Age, inflating assets and understating liabilities was standard practice across a booming system. And who can forget the “channel stuffing” of the 2000s?And, because some things are eternal, this era naturally has its own creative accounting practices, which I published a feature on this past weekend. Right now, some of the most clear shenanigans are going on around ARR, or “annual recurring revenue.” “The problem is that so much of this is essentially vibe revenue,” one VC told me. “It’s not Google signing a data center contract. That’s real shit. Some startup that’s using your product temporarily? That’s really not revenue.”ARR was a favorite metric of VCs throughout the software-as-a-service (SaaS) era, widely accepted as a trusted proxy for a stable and growing startup. Now, founders are trying to apply ARR to the AI boom—and it doesn’t fit. These days, founders are counting pilots, one-time deals, or unactivated contracts as recurring revenue, six VCs told Fortune. The push comes from somewhere very human, from a desire to keep up with the competition. “There is all this pressure from companies like Decagon, Cursor, and Cognition that are just crushing it,” said another VC. “There’s so much pressure to be the company that went from zero to $100 million in X days.”At the center of all this is an essential truth: That we’re going to need to evolve metrics with AI, and how AI companies actually work. And in the meantime, it’s worth saying: Creative accounting has been around as long as businesses were counting, but that doesn’t mean it’s good practice. That doesn’t mean it’s safe or healthy for the system. And it doesn’t mean there won’t be consequences for some down the line. Read the whole story here. Term Sheet Podcast…This week’s guest is Hans Tung, managing partner at Notable Capital. Hans first became a VC in his 20s and has gone on to invest in some of the most successful companies of our time: household names like Airbnb, Slack, Coinbase, and Peloton, among others. He was an early backer of Musical.ly, the app that became TikTok. Hans talks about what makes a good investor, his take on AI bubble anxieties, and more. Listen and watch here.See you tomorrow,Allie GarfinkleX: @agarfinksEmail: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.comSubmit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.This story was originally featured on Fortune.com