Is AI TVs taking over Smart TVs a good thing? Discuss.

Manufacturers plan to bring Copilot and Gemini to Smart TVs – here’s why that may be bad news for consumers


AI TVs
AI TVs are coming and, if CES 2025 was any indication, they may take over what we now refer to as Smart TVs in the not-too-distant future. Who stands to gain more from this transition, though? (Image: Sony/The Point Online)


One didn’t have to be a market insider, an analyst or a tech reporter to know what was coming for televisions during CES 2025. Pretty much everyone knew that artificial intelligence would crop up, in one form or another, in many press releases and product descriptions over the span of a week – this being a point in time where AI is still being adopted as something relatively new by most major manufacturers.

Hardly anyone was ready, though, for the number of announcements made about AI in modern TVs or the depth of integration some TV manufacturers have planned for such functionality. Samsung and LG leaned on this harder than others, yes, but it seems that a number of other competitors will be closely following. If last year’s most interesting CES observation regarding the TV category was the ever greater importance of picture processing, then this year’s was the adoption of AI. No question about it.

In retrospect, we should probably have seen AI TVs coming. Televisions are among the most popular consumer electronics categories, after all, and AI has already found its way – big time – into other mainstream tech products, such as PCs or smartphones. Despite the ups and downs it’s going through, AI is still a hot topic and a highly marketable concept – so it was only a matter of time before TV sets got the AI treatment too.

The question is: who asked for this much AI in our TVs anyway? The answer is rather unpleasant because, as it turns out, this is not about what consumers asked or didn’t ask for. Again.

LG and Samsung bet big on ChatGPT – sorry, on Microsoft Copilot

Just setting the stage here: promoting AI (or “AI”) on new TV sets is not a new thing. LG and Samsung have used the term “artificial intelligence” – albeit in a decidedly abusive manner – since 2017 and 2018, attaching it to things like information search via voice commands and video content upscaling respectively. By 2020, though, they settled on a common meaning for it: when it came to LG or Samsung TVs, “AI” this and “AI that” just meant “smart processing”, in the sense that picture processing relied on machine learning algorithms (trained on static data) and sound processing used content recognition for improved playback. But that was all.

Well, not anymore. Both LG and Samsung will be integrating Microsoft Copilot into the operating systems of their new TV sets. Copilot is largely based on ChatGPT, leveraging its various AI models and Microsoft’s Azure server infrastructure so as to deliver answers to natural language questions in real time, based on Web sources.

AI TVs
LG’s latest webOS will be using Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant in order to deliver answers to natural language questions in real time. Whether older LG TVs ill be getting those promised webOS upgrades in order to sport the same AI functionality is currently unknown. (Image: LG)


Copilot is a rather controversial Windows 11 feature for various reasons, but it’s now going to be a part of the TV user experience on both webOS and Tizen OS. Copilot will probably be active by default on these TVs and less likely to be turned off – assuming that’s an option – than it is on PCs.

Copilot on consumer electronics is a problem for two reasons. One: ChatGPT – even after several major revisions – is still very much a work in progress. It’s an imperfect, often unreliable way of getting and/or stringing together information from sources whose subject authority or accuracy is all over the place. Answers given by ChatGPT about a lot of topics basically need to be fact-checked, which kind of defeats the purpose of turning to a chatbot instead of the Web (where users can filter sources on their own).

This is something that many people know, while lots of other people – probably way more people – do not. Offering Copilot on a mainstream product like a TV, where fact-checking an answer is next to impossible, may not be the wisest thing to do… yet here we are.

Microsoft’s Copilot being part of the operating systems of Smart TVs will only be making things worse in terms of user privacy and data gathering.

We’ll know more about the way LG and Samsung chose to implement Copilot in the operating systems of their respective TVs – whether it’s limited to certain topics, whether there are special safeguards in place etc. – in due course. The second problem, though, is already a serious one with modern smart TVs and it’s only getting worse through the use of Copilot and ChatGPT: data gathering and user privacy. A number of manufacturers have been accused of collecting traffic data and usage data from their TVs over the years, but it’s been recently proven that Samsung and LG in particular even collect screenshots of what consumers are watching on their TVs from external sources (!), which is a blatant invasion of privacy at a level previously unheard of.

In that context, it’s easy to imagine a lot of data being collected while consumers make use of these new Copilot-based AI functions and even that data being assigned to unique digital fingerprints stored in databases for statistical and marketing purposes (if not sold outright to ad networks as usable data in the long run). On a mainstream consumer device that’s highly problematic precisely because such data collection will be happening in the background in a way that’s totally invisible to the user.

Copilot
Microsoft’s Copilot is based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT: a still imperfect, often unreliable way of getting and/or stringing together information from sources whose subject authority or accuracy is all over the place. (Image: Microsoft)


Because they are obliged to do so by law, sure, manufacturers will typically have to get a TV owner’s consent in order to do so, but the necessary fine print will be buried in a long body of legalese that practically nobody’s reading when setting up a new TV set. When using a remote it’s almost always “I Agree”, “Next”, “Next”, “Finish” – and not a lot of people will be coming back to Settings to change any relevant options at a later time.

Copilot and ChatGPT working in “invisible mode”, so to speak, is the perfect way for live services such as these to collect user data over the Internet: consumers will only be seeing the front-end of this system (the simple user interface of this or that AI function) while the back-end will be storing and sending over any and all captured information, from geolocation, time of interaction and type of information requested to the entirety of queries a person makes in the form of natural language questions and the relevant results.

Even if all that data is not tied to individual user accounts and e-mail addresses (which is not out of the question for the likes of Samsung or Microsoft), it’s still usable, valuable information most TV owners will have no idea they are imparting with every single day.

The Google angle – complete with subscriptions in the future

People who care about user privacy might be thinking “Well, if I steer clear of those new LG and Samsung TVs featuring Copilot I should be fine” but, sadly, they are wrong. TCL, Hisense, Sony, Philips and other TV manufacturers depending on the Google TV operating system may all end up adopting Gemini – the search giant’s Copilot equivalent powered by its own large language model – at some point or another. A few such examples were shown during CES 2025, giving journalists an idea of how Google’s AI assistant will gradually replace the current Google Assistant and become the default way of interacting with future versions of Google TV.

AI TVs
Sony, HiSense or Philips have not yet shown TV models featuring Google Gemini, but TCL has and is planning to bring its own models to market this year. Once Google officially makes Gemini a part of Google TV, manufacturers using it will have no choice but to adopt AI too. (Image: Sony)


Gemini is already being used on Google’s Pixel and Samsung’s Galaxy S smartphones (performing creative-focused or productivity-focused functions), but it will have to be modified in order to work seamlessly on smart TVs. Since the only obvious way of doing that right now is through voice commands and voice recognition, that’s where Google plans to focus on, making use of the far-field microphones many Google TV-based models will be equipped with or the built-in microphones many of these sets’ remote controls sport nowadays.

Google is even hoping to make artificial intelligence on TVs so desirable that consumers might be willing to pay subscription fees for the most advanced functionality based on it.

Just like in the case of Copilot, all the data involved during the use of any Gemini-based AI functionality are expected to be gathered and stored remotely, raising the same user privacy concerns. What’s interesting – and even more concerning – with Gemini is that Google is keen on integrating it with the Google TV operating system to such an extent, that advanced AI functionality would be only accessible through a subscription at some point.

Yes, that is correct: Google hopes that features like e.g. creating news briefs to listen to (based on user-defined sources) or combining security camera feeds with image recognition and notification messaging in real time would eventually provide enough value for consumers to consider subscribing. Personalization is key for services such as these, so storing and processing extensive user data would be a given at that point.

That new TV set may not be the product anymore – maybe you are

Leveraging tech products as popular as smart TVs for advertising or marketing purposes is inevitable. In a world where Telly would give away 55-inch TVs provided we’d watch ads on them, where Amazon would sell its own TVs at a cost only to overstuff them with non-escapable ads later or where Walmart would acquire a manufacturer like Vizio purely for the large customer base of televisions it can display ads on, promotional messaging on Internet-connected TV screens was always going to become part of the ad business landscape.

AI TVs
Not only is Samsung bringing Copilot to its 2025 Smart TVs, but it’s also planning to collaborate with OpenAI directly for specific ChatGPT functionality – possibly beyond what Microsoft’s chatbot is currently capable of. (Image: Samsung)


There’s something devious, though – almost sinister – in using AI TVs as a Trojan horse for data gathering and ad targeting. Various manufacturers are either trying to dazzle people with the promise of futuristic but unnecessary functions or planning to offer genuinely useful ones, both based on AI, without clearly disclosing – let alone actively informing consumers – that every single one of those functions will be also be harvesting extensive personal data in the background. Since all of this will be taking place on top of the data gathering already going on, AI TV functionality may prove to be a real problem for consumers who value their privacy.

To answer the initial question of this piece, though: who asked for this much AI in our TVs anyway? Considering all of the above, it’s clear that it was not consumers that needed that. Not only did they not ask for it, but there was not much of a point in adding complex AI features to Smart TVs in the first place. The kind of functionality that’s actually useful on modern televisions – such as e.g. content recommendations based on watch history – is already offered in a satisfactory manner without leveraging large language models or requiring even more personal information from consumers in order to work.

Most AI TV functionality shown so far provides not a lot of value to consumers… but a whole lot of value to manufacturers and ad networks that depend on data gathering.

No. It was actually most TV manufacturers, Google, Microsoft, ad networks and others that needed artificial intelligence features (and their respective platforms) shoved into the operating systems on modern Smart TVs. It’s all done in the name of consumer convenience but – based on what any of these companies have demonstrated so far – there’s little value in all of this for consumers and way more value in the data gathered through their use of these features.

Here’s hope that people realize how serious a threat this is to their data privacy and show more interest in protecting it than they do e.g. when using Windows-based computers. Fingers… crossed?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Kostas Farkonas

Veteran reporter and business consultant with over 30 years of industry experience in various media and roles, focusing on consumer tech, modern entertainment and digital culture.

Veteran reporter and business consultant with over 30 years of industry experience in various media and roles, focusing on consumer tech, modern entertainment and digital culture.