AI;DR is coming for your employee comms
There's a new acronym making the rounds: AI;DR. Short for "AI Didn't Read."
It started on Threads when a developer named David Minajirode read an Anthropic researcher's resignation letter and wrote, "Some of those sentences, yeesh." He coined AI;DR as a way to dismiss content that smells like it came from a chatbot rather than a person.
(It riffs on TL;DR, but where TL;DR is about length, AI;DR is about authenticity.)
Jenni Field and I got into this on a recent episode of Frequency.
The Fast Company piece that surfaced AI;DR cited a 2024 study showing more than half of long-form LinkedIn posts are likely AI-assisted. The platforms reward volume over quality. AI-generated content keeps working until audiences start tuning it out entirely.
And they are tuning it out. Merriam-Webster's 2025 Word of the Year was SLOP. The backlash is real and it's already here.
The part I keep coming back to
My take on AI-assisted writing has always been pretty simple: the "assisted" part matters. AI helping you draft, organize, or tighten your thinking is the tool being used correctly. AI generating your all-staff message while you go do something else is not writing. It's noise with formatting.
A 2024 study found more than half of long-form LinkedIn posts are likely AI-assisted. I want to be careful with that stat, because "likely AI-assisted" is not the same as "AI-written." I use AI to help me think through ideas all the time. That's different from handing it a prompt and hitting send. One of those is using a tool. The other is pretending you did the work.
The "didn't read" reflex was already there before AI;DR gave it a name. People have always scanned corporate communications and skipped what felt like noise. We all know this. AI;DR just made it a shareable label.
Where this gets specific for employee communication
The AI;DR problem hits internal communications differently than it hits LinkedIn posts or marketing copy.
Your employees see your name on that all-staff email. They read it knowing you had time to write it. They know the audience is small and specific. If it reads like a press release a chatbot drafted for a company that doesn't quite sound like theirs, they notice. They notice immediately.
Here are the employee communication ideas that actually work against an AI;DR reflex:
Write fewer things better. The volume trap is real. AI makes it easy to generate ten updates in an hour. That doesn't mean you should. Two messages that people actually read and trust are worth more than ten that trained them to scroll past your name.
Use AI like a junior copywriter. Draft together. Then edit the way you'd edit anyone's work before putting your name on it. If you wouldn't send it under their byline, don't send it under yours.
Read it out loud before it goes out. If it doesn't sound like a human being wrote it, a human needs to rewrite it. That's the only test that matters. Not a readability score. Your own ear.
Say something real. The shortcut that AI;DR exposes is the shortcut of using polish as a substitute for substance. Employees aren't looking for perfect prose. They're looking for a reason to believe the message means something. That only comes through when a person wrote it and meant it.
The part that's on us
The honest version of this is that most internal communicators already know better. We've always known employees can tell. We've said it in conferences, in strategy documents, in workshops. We know spin has a smell.
We got seduced by the speed. I get it. The pressure to produce is real. But AI;DR is employees telling us they noticed the tradeoff we made.
The good news is the fix is not complicated. It takes the thing the tool can't provide.
Show up and write it.
Written by Chuck Gose, founder of ICology.