The Case for a Dumb Television in an Increasingly Smart World

LG’s recent webOS update forcibly installs Microsoft Copilot on its smart TVs, prioritizing advertising and data collection over user experience.

February 17, 2026 by Enrique DansLeave a Comment

In recent months I have spent a worrying amount of time observing the direction of travel of “smart TVs”, encapsulated by the recent LG update that, unasked, installs Microsoft Copilot, and which then cannot be removed, just hidden. What this points to is a strategy that, consciously or not, encourages those of us who still value the basic television experience from steering clear of LG.

This month has seen LG televisions receive an update to its webOS which means the only way not to see Copilot is to hide the icon. This reflects the trend of turning a piece of consumer hardware into a platform for advertising, data and services that the user has never asked for. It’s a “since you have a screen there that you look at regularly, I’m going to put whatever I want on it”. This new “business model” is based on obtaining information from the user, turning your television into a device that spies on you, which a number of governments have already acted against.

This is by no means an isolated event: the industry has been moving toward the forced integration of AI assistants for months, often at the cost of useful features. A few months ago the company announced it would remove Google Assistant from its televisions, replacing it with Copilot or its own solutions, prompting complaints from many users who now have to look for workarounds, from connecting external devices to rethinking the use of their television itself.

The “flipped value proposition,” where what’s installed on a device without permission takes priority over what the buyer actually wants (usually, seeing content with as little interruption as possible), should give anyone pause for thought. I’ve written about how traditional television died when manufacturers began seeing us as products rather than customers, an experience that increasingly angers me: my television interrupts what I’m watching to show to LG advertisements. How this is not illegal I don’t know.

LG’s latest stunt doubles down: giant screens are transformed into catch-alls for third-party services, data collected without any transparency, and features that rarely provide real value for those who only want to watch the news or enjoy a movie.

Manufacturers are calling the unwanted installation of Copilot on their televisions “AI Vision” at shows such as CES 2025, with promises of conversational search and intelligent recommendations based on language models. But the absence of clear demos and the media’s correct perception that all this is nothing more than access to a simple web app, rather than robust native experiences suggests marketing rather than innovation.

So what exactly are we buying when we get a smart TV today? A device for watching content or a digital services console that progressively takes over our main screen and our data? Why allow the person who manufactures the screen to decide which functionalities are mandatory in it, even if we don’t want them?

Looking at forums and social networks, a growing number of people seem to be giving up on so-called smart televisions and going old school in a bid to retain some control: buying monitors that they can control with Amazon Fire, Google Chromecast, Apple TV, or directly from a computer.

I too may head down this road, because, in a world of unwanted updates and assistants, along with the removal of useful features, hardware has become a cage with LED lights and built-in microphones.

This latest aspect of surveillance capitalism is not inevitable, but it is important to recognize it. What we start out calling progress can all too easily morph into a series of vendor lock-ins disguised as “intelligence”, but in reality, contempt for the customer. The value for the user should be the axis of the experience, not the value that third parties can extract from them. And if a product called a “television” ceases to comply with that premise, then perhaps it is advisable to rethink whether what we want is a television or a screen that does what we want, rather than what the manufacturer wants by updating its software without asking us.

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This post was previously published on Enrique Dans’ blog.

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