- Posted on May 24, 2026
- 5 min read
🤖 AI summary: This article examines how the term "artificial intelligence" has been co-opted by companies as a marketing buzzword, often attached to products that have little to no genuine AI capability. Using Apple Intelligence and its $250 million false advertising settlement as a case study, the piece argues that this trend of "AI washing" is eroding public trust, confusing ordinary users, and making it harder to recognize the technology when it actually delivers real value.
Every product in 2026 is "AI-powered." Your toothbrush is AI-powered. Your coffee maker is AI-powered. The spreadsheet app you have been using for ten years just got a rebrand, and now it is "AI-powered" too. Nothing changed except the logo and a press release.
I have been watching this happen for two years now, and I think we have reached a tipping point. The word "AI" has been stretched so thin by marketing departments that it is starting to mean absolutely nothing to the average person.
And the companies doing the stretching are not scrappy startups trying to get attention. They are some of the biggest names in tech.
The Apple Intelligence Fiasco
Let us talk about the elephant in the room. Apple.
In September 2024, Apple launched the iPhone 16 series with a massive marketing push around "Apple Intelligence." The keynote was slick. The ads were everywhere. The message was clear: this phone is smart, and it is smart because of AI.
There was just one small problem. The AI features were not ready.
When people bought their shiny new iPhone 16, they discovered that most of the flagship "Apple Intelligence" features were either delayed, incomplete, or straight-up missing. The notification summaries hallucinated. Siri was still Siri. The "intelligent" features that were supposed to justify the upgrade were nowhere to be found at launch.
Apple had sold a promise, not a product.
In 2025, a class-action lawsuit was filed alleging false advertising. The plaintiffs argued that Apple had used AI capabilities as a primary selling point for the iPhone 16 lineup, knowing full well that those capabilities were not available at the time of purchase. And they had a point. If you watch those launch ads again, Apple Intelligence was not presented as a "coming soon" feature. It was presented as a reason to buy the phone right now.
Apple settled for $250 million. The settlement covers anyone who bought an iPhone 16 (any model) or an iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max between June 2024 and March 2025. Eligible buyers could receive between $25 and $95 per device. The final approval hearing is scheduled for June 2026.
Let that sink in. A quarter of a billion dollars. Because a company slapped the word "Intelligence" on features that did not exist yet.
AI Washing Is the New Greenwashing
Apple is not alone. What happened with Apple Intelligence is just the most visible example of a much bigger trend that the industry is now calling "AI washing."
If you were around in the 2010s, you remember greenwashing. That is when companies would slap a green leaf on their packaging and call themselves "eco-friendly" without actually changing anything about their manufacturing process. The label was meaningless, but it sold products.
AI washing is the exact same playbook. And it is everywhere.
- Presto Automation was charged by the SEC in early 2025 for claiming it used proprietary AI technology in its drive-through automation system. In reality, it was using third-party tools and heavy human intervention behind the scenes. The "AI" was basically people in a call center.
- Companies laying off workers have started citing "AI efficiency" as the reason for the cuts, even when the layoffs are clearly driven by financial restructuring or overhiring corrections. AI becomes the convenient scapegoat. "We are not firing people because we made bad decisions. We are firing people because the robots are just that good." Even Sam Altman has called this out.
- The FTC has taken enforcement actions against multiple companies, including Growth Cave, Air AI, and Cox Media Group, for misrepresenting what their so-called AI products actually do.
The pattern is always the same. Take an existing product. Add the letters "AI" to the name. Watch the stock price go up or the customers flood in. Hope nobody looks under the hood.
Why This Hurts Everyone
Here is why I care about this as a developer, and why you should too.
When every company calls everything "AI," the word loses its signal. The average person, your mom, your client, your neighbor, can no longer tell the difference between a genuine AI system and a glorified if-else statement with a chatbot skin.
I see this constantly in my web design work. Clients come to me and say, "We need AI on our website." When I ask what they mean, they usually describe something that is not AI at all. They want a FAQ section. They want a contact form that auto-responds. They want a product filter that remembers preferences. These are useful features, but they are not artificial intelligence. They are just good UX.
But because every SaaS tool they use has told them it is "AI-powered," they now think any moderately smart feature qualifies. The bar has been lowered so far that "AI" now means "it does something automatically."
This creates two real problems:
- Trust erosion: When people buy an "AI-powered" product and it does not feel intelligent at all, they stop trusting the label entirely. And then when something genuinely impressive comes along, like actual real-time language translation or meaningful code generation, they are already skeptical. "Sure, they say it is AI. The last thing that said it was AI was my toaster."
- Budget misallocation: Businesses are spending real money on "AI solutions" that are just repackaged automation. I have seen small e-commerce clients drop thousands on an "AI marketing platform" that turned out to be a basic email scheduler with a fancy dashboard. That money could have gone toward actual improvements to their site speed, their UX, or their conversion funnel.
The "Intelligence" Bar Is on the Floor
Part of the problem is that nobody has agreed on what "AI" actually means in a consumer context.
In academia, artificial intelligence refers to systems that can learn, reason, adapt, and make decisions in novel situations. That is a high bar. GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, these models genuinely clear that bar in meaningful ways. They can synthesize information, generate creative output, and handle tasks they were never explicitly trained for.
But in marketing? "AI" just means "we added an algorithm." A spam filter is AI. A recommendation engine is AI. Auto-brightness on your phone is AI. Predictive text is AI.
When you define AI that broadly, the word becomes meaningless. It is like calling every vehicle a "spaceship." A bicycle technically transports you through space, but nobody is going to be impressed when you tell them you arrived on a spaceship and they see a bicycle parked outside.
Apple calling Siri "intelligent" is a bit like parking a bicycle and calling it a spaceship. The word is doing a lot of heavy lifting that the product cannot support.
What Real AI Looks Like (And Why It Matters)
I want to be clear about something. I am not anti-AI. I have written extensively about AI on this blog. I think AI coding tools are powerful when used correctly. I think AI agents are going to transform how we manage websites. I have seen firsthand what AI agents can do in a WordPress environment, and it is genuinely impressive.
But those tools work because they are backed by actual large language models with billions of parameters, trained on massive datasets, capable of reasoning about novel problems. That is real AI. That is the thing worth getting excited about.
The problem is not AI itself. The problem is the label being used as a costume. When a company puts "AI" on a product that is really just a rules engine or a basic automation script, it cheapens the actual breakthroughs. It makes people tired of the word before they ever get to experience the real thing.
A Developer's Responsibility
As developers and designers, I think we have a small but important role here.
When a client asks for "AI features," we should be honest about what they actually need. If they need a chatbot, give them a chatbot and call it a chatbot. If they need a recommendation engine, build one and explain how it works. Do not call it "AI-powered" if it is just filtering products by purchase history.
And when we use actual AI in our workflows, like using language models to generate content or code, we should be transparent about what the AI is doing and what its limitations are. I wrote about this in my piece on the Vibe Tax. The tool is powerful, but it is not magic. Calling it magic is how you end up with $250 million lawsuits.
The Verdict
The word "AI" used to mean something. It used to carry weight. It used to make you lean forward and pay attention.
Now it is on toothbrush packaging.
Apple showed us what happens when a company over-promises on AI. A quarter-billion-dollar settlement and a wave of consumer distrust. But Apple is just the company that got caught. Hundreds of other companies are doing the same thing on a smaller scale, every single day.
If we want AI to keep meaning something, if we want people to actually trust the technology when it delivers real value, then we need to stop letting the marketing departments turn "artificial intelligence" into the new "all-natural" or "military-grade." Those phrases are meaningless now. "AI" is heading in the same direction.
The next time you see a product that claims to be AI-powered, ask yourself one question: "If I removed the AI label, would this product seem any different?"
If the answer is no, you have just spotted AI washing. And unfortunately, you are going to keep spotting it everywhere.
