What's this about?
A two-word coinage became the day's most-read story. "AI;DR" — AI; didn't read — started as a tweet that drew 16,600 likes, and the post explaining it articulates the policy behind it: if you couldn't be bothered to review and edit what the model wrote, I won't be bothered to read it. The author describes a physical reaction — flinching, shoulders dropping — when someone he respects sends unedited AI output. His framing is deliberately not anti-AI: it's Q3 2026, everyone uses AI somewhere in their process. The objection is to shipping the raw output.
What exactly is it playing on?
It's built on TL;DR — "too long; didn't read" — which is decades old internet shorthand, used either to ask for a summary or to dismiss something as too long to bother with. AI;DR reuses the grammar and swaps the complaint: the problem is no longer length but provenance. That's a meaningful shift. TL;DR was about the reader's patience; AI;DR is about the writer's investment, and specifically about effort as a signal of respect.
What's the community saying?
- "This is HW;DR: human-written, did read." The top comment, and the whole thread's mood in four words.
- The strongest counterargument was about editors. We've had copywriters and ghostwriters for generations — refusing to read something because AI did the drafting was called "kinda weak" by a well-received dissent, since the relevant question is whether the sender stands behind it.
- A constructive proposal that got traction. If a long text was generated from a much shorter prompt, publish the prompt and sources instead — or at least alongside. The information was in the prompt; the expansion added length, not content.
- A defense of plain old TL;DR. Several pushed back on the framing that TL;DR was ever hostile; it's often a genuine service, and lumping it in with slop-refusal does it a disservice.
- The joke that keeps working. "Too sloppy, didn't read" — and the variant that resurfaced a day later on an anti-Anthropic polemic, "as;dr (AI slop, didn't read)," suggesting the construction is already generative.