A friend forwarded me a rejection email last month. Standard "we have decided to move forward with another candidate" template. He noticed something at the bottom that I had not seen before — a tiny disclosure line: "This message was generated with assistance from our AI hiring tools." I started looking for that line in other rejection emails. Once I started looking, I saw it everywhere — sometimes explicit, sometimes implied, sometimes written into the company's privacy policy but not the email itself. By my count, AI is now writing or co-writing about 38% of rejection emails I see in the wild as of early 2026. This matters more than it sounds, because the AI rejection emails follow patterns you can recognize, and the pattern tells you whether your application got close to a real human or not. The 3 most common AI-generated patterns Pattern A: Templated with mild rewriting. The base template is human-written; a model has rewritten it slightly to vary the surface.…