People are using AI to make their smart TVs dumb again

One such solution, called “dumbtv,” describes its mission on its GitHub page thus: “Your TV should do what you paid for: your apps, your HDMI inputs, and nothing else. No ads from the TV itself, no watch tracking, no update you did not ask for.”

Another, “cleanyourtv,” promises to strip the bloatware from any Android TV or Google TV over Wi-Fi, to replace the launcher with one that resembles Apple TV.

While hacking consumer electronics devices to gain more control over their systems is hardly a new idea, the latest advances in AI technology have made such efforts much more accessible to anyone. With smart TVs in particular, the hacks come at a time when people have grown frustrated with being forced to watch ads and put up with their devices surveilling their viewing habits.

Modern smart TVs ship with a technology called Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), which identifies what’s playing on the screen using screenshots, audio clips or other forms of digital fingerprinting.

If these “dumb TV” hacks become more popular among everyday consumers, they have the potential to disrupt the smart TV ad industry, which profits from selling viewing data to advertisers or using it to display personalized ads on their own interfaces.

As the creator of cleanyourtv, Gathin T., puts it, the idea to clean up the smart TV interface started one afternoon when he got tired of seeing the ads on his parents’ TV set.

“I had Claude Code clean it up over Wi-Fi and build a simple home screen with just their apps on it. I put the prompt on GitHub, tweeted the before and after,s and a few thousand people did the same to their own TVs over the next two days. Xiaomi, TCL, Sony, Fire TV, LG, a projector or two,” the developer wrote on a website for donations, linked from the project’s homepage.

The solution doesn’t require gaining root access to the TV, nor does it make it impossible to return to the factory default state, if desired.