People Are Now Using AI to Fight Back Against Smart TV Ads and Tracking

The latest everyday use for AI is making a smart TV less smart. TechCrunch reports that developers and hobbyists are using AI coding agents to remove sponsored ads, speed up sluggish launchers, redesign home screens and disable tracking features on connected televisions.

Two community projects have drawn the most attention. The dumbtv project describes its aim plainly: "Your TV should do what you paid for: your apps, your HDMI inputs, and nothing else." Cleanyourtv promises to strip bloatware from Android TV and Google TV over Wi-Fi and swap in a simpler launcher. A few details show how the trend works:

• Cleanyourtv's creator, Gathin T., started it after getting tired of the ads on his parents' TV, and thousands of people reportedly applied his published prompt to their own sets within two days, per a summary of the TechCrunch report
• In a viral X post, Ryan Doyle said he sent an AI agent his TV listing and asked it to hack it, and it walked him through removing ads and bloatware, speeding up the interface and customizing the screensaver
• One developer reportedly used Claude Code to remove 25 apps from his parents' Xiaomi TV and replace the main menu

The caveats are real. These are works in progress, and AI-generated instructions can misidentify a firmware version or a package, so disabling the wrong component can break a device.

Reports describe stalled modifications and at least one user whose TV stopped working altogether, which is why some coverage points readers toward conventional launcher apps as a safer route.

TechCrunch notes that if these "dumb TV" tricks go mainstream, they could eventually pressure an advertising business built on selling viewing data or showing personalized ads.

For now, anyone tempted should treat it as a project for people comfortable risking their device, since the gap between a cleaner TV and an unusable one can come down to a single bad instruction.