I replied to you you elsewhere in this thread, but they never claimed to be getting 28% CTR. They only claimed that this format performs 28% better than alternatives.
If a different ad format was getting 1% CTR, then a 28% improvement is still only a total 1.28% CTR.
In defence of the author, there is absolutely nothing about the term "AI" that just means "LLM" in an informed context (which is what Wired portends to be). And then the words "machine learning" are literally front and centre in the subtitle.
I don't see how anyone could misunderstand this unless it was a deliberate misreading... Or else just not attempting to read it at all...
(That said, yes, I do hate the fact that product managers now love to talk about how every single feature is "AI" regardless of what it actually is/does)