Apple, already moving slowly out of the gate on generative AI, has been dealing with a number of roadblocks and mounting delays in its effort to bring a truly AI-enabled Siri to market. The problem, or, one of the problems, is that Apple used these same AI features to heavily promote its latest iPhone, which, as it says on its website, was “built for Apple Intelligence.”
Now, the tech giant has been accused of false advertising in a proposed class action lawsuit that argues that Apple’s “pervasive” marketing campaign was “built on a lie.”
The details: Apple has — if reluctantly — acknowledged delays on a more advanced Siri, pulling one of the ads that demonstrated the product and adding a disclaimer to its iPhone 16 product page that the feature is “in development and will be available with a future software update.”
But that, to the plaintiffs, isn’t good enough. Apple, according to the complaint, has “deceived millions of consumers into purchasing new phones they did not need based on features that do not exist, in violation of multiple false advertising and consumer protection laws.”
Apple “enriched itself by saving the costs they reasonably should have spent on ensuring that the (iPhones) had the technical capabilities advertised,” according to the complaint.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit was first reported by Axios, and can be read here.
This all comes amid an executive shuffling that just took place over at Apple HQ, which put Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell in charge of the Siri overhaul, according to Bloomberg.
Still, shares of Apple rallied to close the day up around 2%, though the stock is still down 12% for the year.
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Early attempts at artificial intelligence (AI) were ridiculed for giving answers that were confident, wrong and often surreal – the intellectual equivalent of asking a drunken parrot to explain Kant. But modern AIs based on large language models (LLMs) are so polished, articulate and eerily competent at generating answers that many people assume they can know and, even
better, can independently reason their way to knowing.
This confidence is misplaced. LLMs like ChatGPT or Grok don’t think. They are supercharged autocomplete engines. You type a prompt; they predict the next word, then the next, based only on patterns in the trillions of words they were trained on. No rules, no logic – just statistical guessing dressed up in conversation. As a result, LLMs have no idea whether a sentence is true or false or even sane; they only “know” whether it sounds like sentences they’ve seen before. That’s why they often confidently make things up: court cases, historical events, or physics explanations that are pure fiction. The AI world calls such outputs
“hallucinations”.
But because the LLM’s speech is fluent, users instinctively project self-understanding onto the model, triggered by the same human “trust circuits” we use for spotting intelligence. But it is fallacious reasoning, a bit like hearing someone speak perfect French and assuming they must also be an excellent judge of wine, fashion and philosophy. We confuse style for substance and
we anthropomorphize the speaker. That in turn tempts us into two mythical narratives: Myth 1: “If we just scale up the models and give them more ‘juice’ then true reasoning will eventually emerge.”
Bigger LLMs do get smoother and more impressive. But their core trick – word prediction – never changes. It’s still mimicry, not understanding. One assumes intelligence will magically emerge from quantity, as though making tires bigger and spinning them faster will eventually make a car fly. But the obstacle is architectural, not scalar: you can make the mimicry more
convincing (make a car jump off a ramp), but you don’t convert a pattern predictor into a truth-seeker by scaling it up. You merely get better camouflage and, studies have shown, even less fidelity to fact.
Myth 2: “Who cares how AI does it? If it yields truth, that’s all that matters. The ultimate arbiter of truth is reality – so cope!”
This one is especially dangerous as it stomps on epistemology wearing concrete boots. It effectively claims that the seeming reliability of LLM’s mundane knowledge should be extended to trusting the opaque methods through which it is obtained. But truth has rules. For example, a conclusion only becomes epistemically trustworthy when reached through either: 1) deductive reasoning (conclusions that must be true if the premises are true); or 2) empirical verification (observations of the real world that confirm or disconfirm claims).
LLMs do neither of these. They cannot deduce because their architecture doesn’t implement logical inference. They don’t manipulate premises and reach conclusions, and they are clueless about causality. They also cannot empirically verify anything because they have no access to reality: they can’t check weather or observe social interactions.
Attempting to overcome these structural obstacles, AI developers bolt external tools like calculators, databases and retrieval systems onto an LLM system. Such ostensible truth-seeking mechanisms improve outputs but do not fix the underlying architecture.
The “flying car” salesmen, peddling various accomplishments like IQ test scores, claim that today’s LLMs show superhuman intelligence. In reality, LLM IQ tests violate every rule for conducting intelligence tests, making them a human-prompt engineering skills competition rather than a valid assessment of machine smartness.
Efforts to make LLMs “truth-seeking” by brainwashing them to align with their trainer’s preferences through mechanisms like RLHF miss the point. Those attempts to fix bias only make waves in a structure that cannot support genuine reasoning. This regularly reveals itself through flops like xAI Grok’s MechaHitler bravado or Google Gemini’s representing America’s Founding Fathers as a lineup of “racialized” gentlemen.
Other approaches exist, though, that strive to create an AI architecture enabling authentic thinking:
Symbolic AI: uses explicit logical rules; strong on defined problems, weak on ambiguity;
Causal AI: learns cause-and-effect relationships and can answer “what if” questions;
Neuro-symbolic AI: combines neural prediction with logical reasoning; and
Agentic AI: acts with the goal in mind, receives feedback and improves through trial-and-error.
Unfortunately, the current progress in AI relies almost entirely on scaling LLMs. And the alternative approaches receive far less funding and attention – the good old “follow the money” principle. Meanwhile, the loudest “AI” in the room is just a very expensive parrot.
LLMs, nevertheless, are astonishing achievements of engineering and wonderful tools useful for many tasks. I will have far more on their uses in my next column. The crucial thing for users to remember, though, is that all LLMs are and will always remain linguistic pattern engines, not epistemic agents.
The hype that LLMs are on the brink of “true intelligence” mistakes fluency for thought. Real thinking requires understanding the physical world, persistent memory, reasoning and planning that LLMs handle only primitively or not all – a design fact that is non-controversial among AI insiders. Treat LLMs as useful thought-provoking tools, never as trustworthy sources. And stop waiting for the parrot to start doing philosophy. It never will.
Gleb Lisikh is a researcher and IT management professional, and a father of three children, who lives in Vaughan, Ontario and grew up in various parts of the Soviet Union.
Parents should take precaution this holiday season when it comes to artificial intelligence toys after researchers for the new Trouble in Toyland report found safety concerns.
Illinois Public Interest Research Group Campaign Associate Ellen Hengesbach said some of the toys armed with AI raised red flags ranging from toys that talk in-depth about sexually explicit topics to acting dismayed when the child disengages.
“What they look like are basically stuffed animals or toy robots that have a chatbot like Chat GPT embedded in them and can have conversations with children,” Hengesbach told The Center Square.
The U.S. PIRG Education Fund report also points out that at least three toys have limited to no parental controls and have the capacity to record your child’s voice and collect other sensitive data via facial recognition.
“All three were willing to tell us where to find potentially dangerous objects in the house, such as plastic bags, matches, or knives,” she said. “It seems like dystopian science fiction decades ago is now reality.”
In the face of all the changing landscape and rising concerns, Hengesbach is calling for immediate action.
“The two main things that we’d like to see are more oversight in general and more research so we can see exactly how these toys interact with kids, really just identify what the harms might be and have a lot more transparency from companies around how are these toys designed,” she said. “What are they capable of and what the potential risks or harms might be. I just really want us to take this opportunity to really think through what we’re doing instead of rushing a toy to market.”
As for the here and now, Hengesbach stressed parents would be wise to be thoughtful about their purchases.
“We just have a big open question of what are the long-term impacts of these products on young kids, especially when it comes to their social development,” she said. “The fact is that we just really won’t know what the long-term impacts of AI friends and companion toys might be until the first generation playing with them grows up. For now, I think it’s just really important that parents understand that these AI toys are out there; they’re very new and they’re basically unregulated.”
Since the release of the report, Hengesbach said one AI toymaker temporarily suspended sales of all their products to conduct a safety audit.
This year’s 40th Trouble in Toyland report also focuses on toys that contain toxins, counterfeit toys that haven’t been tested for safety, recalled toys and toys that contain button cell batteries or high-powered magnets, both of which can be deadly if swallowed.
