Yup. I had exactly the same trepidation, and then it was all like “As an AI model, I don’t have access to the data you requested, however here are some examples of…”

I have more contempt for the peer reviewers who let those slide into major journals, than for the authors. It’s like the Brown M&M test; if you didn’t spot that blatant howler then no fucking way did you properly check the rest of the paper before waving it through. The biggest scandal in all this isn’t that it happened, it’s that the journals involved seem to be almost never retracting them upon being reported.