When text is free, the editor becomes the product

What this suggests is that when text is free, the editor becomes the product. Every knowledge worker can now produce a polished memo in minutes. The recipient knows this, and the recipient is adjusting. What looks like reader fatigue with AI is, on closer look, fatigue with senders who stop reading the moment the machine starts writing.

Rick Manelius named the line this month—AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)—and his essay says exactly that. Manelius calls himself about as pro-AI as a person can be, and concedes raw AI copy is fine in a customer support reply. The trigger is the unedited part: when a sender forwards machine prose without pausing to decide what to keep, cut, or rewrite, the recipient registers it as a signal that the sender did not bother to think.

A separate Hacker News thread makes the same point in colder language. Its top comment lands the principle: readers come to humans to learn or be persuaded, so a model-generated reply defeats the purpose of writing to them.

The cost has not collapsed. It has migrated. The marginal token is nearly free; the marginal minute a thoughtful sender spends deciding what survives the cut is the new scarce input. The etiquette is no longer whether you used AI. It is whether you bothered to read what AI produced. The reader is screening for that bother, and skipping the rest.