人们正用AI让智能电视重新变“笨”

People are using AI to make their smart TVs dumb again | TechCrunch

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People are using AI to make their smart TVs dumb again

The latest use case for AI? Dumbing down your smart TV to get rid of the bloat. A number of developers and vibe coders have recently been sharing solutions for vibe-coding your TV to get rid of sponsored ads, speed up the app launcher, redesign the home screen, disable tracking features, and more.

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 whats 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.

Vibe coded my parents TV this afternoon!

It was showing a sponsored ad before you could even get to Netflix.

Gave Claude Code the model number, it found the TV on wifi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages and wrote a new launcher.

Looks like an Apple TV now lol pic.twitter.com/E5Q4A1b0yI

— Gathin (Ø,G) (@gathint) October 17, 2026

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 projects homepage.

The solution doesnt require gaining root access to the TV, nor does it make it impossible to return to the factory default state, if desired.

Meanwhile, the dumbtv solution has been tested end-to-end on a Fire TV Edition television set and Android/Google TV platforms on TVs from Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense, Xiaomi, and Shield. To use this hack, the developer, Muzammil Yasin Sabuwala, suggests pointing your preferred AI agent at the dumbtv repository on GitHub.

Sabuwala said he was motivated to work on dumbtv because he was tired of the ads and not being able to delve directly into the content he wanted to watch. His solution was coded using a combination of Deepseek V4.1 Flash, Claude Opus 5.5, and Claude Sonnet 5.5, he told TechCrunch, and he plans to maintain the GitHub, adding support for more models over time.

to setup just point your agent to this repo https://t.co/prQLD17Wa4 https://t.co/z41SWJZVXt pic.twitter.com/c6R8EhljiA

— Muzzammil (@DevMuzzammil) October 18, 2026

Fair warning: all these solutions are works in progress, and various users are now testing them across different TV platforms and suggesting updates and fixes.

However, individuals dont need to borrow someone elses work from GitHub to get the job done.

In one newly viral X post, Ryan Doyle explains that he simply sent Claude Code the listing for his TV and asked Can you hack this? The agent then talked him through the process, allowing him to remove the ads and bloatware from the TV set, speed up the lagging user interface, and customize his screensaver, he claims.

Doyle then goes on to demonstrate in a video how fast and responsive the new interface is after the AI made the requested changes.

This is how fast the TV moves now that Claude deleted all the BS laggy bloatware it comes with https://t.co/nUCEjqPwAO pic.twitter.com/g07CEgC1GJ

— Ryan Doyle (@doooyle) October 17, 2026

Seeing posts about people vibe-coding their TVs, inspired one X user, Mihir Gupta, to try it himself.

One afternoon with Claude Code: 25 bloat apps disabled, the 192 MB stock launcher replaced with a custom 83 MB one, plus rotating wallpapers, he wrote.

The end result of these hacks may be mixed, however. Some people have found that Claude wouldnt respond to their simple suggestions to hack my TV, necessitating more complex prompts. Others warned that AI agents could make mistakes, possibly disabling important packages or breaking things in the process. One person even said they bricked their Android TV using Claude, and another got stuck halfway through hacking their Fire TV.

For those wary of using AI to fully hack their TVs, there are existing solutions for customizing Android-based smart TVs, such as home screen replacement apps ATV Launcher, Projectivity Launcher, and FLauncher.

AI, AI, hacks, Media & Entertainment, smart tv, television

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Sarah has worked as a reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011. She joined the company after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to her work as a reporter, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software.

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