What is the latest use of AI? Make your smart TV “less intelligent” to get rid of its cumbersome features.
Recently, many developers and “vibe coder” have been sharing methods on how to transform televisions through “vibe-coding” in order to remove sponsored ads, speed up app launchers, redesign the home screen, disable tracking features, and more.
One of the solutions, named “dumbtv”, states on its GitHub page: “Your TV should only do what you pay for it to do: run your applications, display your HDMI inputs, and that’s it. No ads from the TV itself, no tracking of your viewing habits, and no updates that you haven’t requested.”
Another project named “cleanyourtv” promises to remove redundant software using Wi-Fi for any Android TV or Google TV, and to replace the launcher with an interface similar to Apple TV.
While gaining more control by cracking consumer electronics devices is not a new phenomenon, the latest advancements in AI technology have made such operations easier for more people. Especially in the field of smart TVs, as such cracks emerge, users are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with being forced to watch advertisements and with devices monitoring their viewing habits.
Modern smart TVs are equipped with a technology called Automatic Content Recognition ( Automatic Content Recognition, ACR ), which identifies the content being played on the screen through screenshots, audio clips, or other digital fingerprints.
If these " dumb TV " cracking methods become more popular among ordinary consumers, they could impact the smart TV advertising industry. This industry makes its profit by selling viewing data to advertisers or by using this data to display personalized ads on their own interfaces.
The creator of cleanyourtv, Gathin T, stated that the idea to clean up the smart TV interface originated one afternoon when he got tired of seeing advertisements on his parents' TVs.
"I asked Claude Code to clean it up using Wi-Fi and created a simple home screen, keeping only their applications. I sent the instructions to GitHub and posted tweets showing before-and-after comparisons. In the following two days, thousands of people did the same to their own TVs. Xiaomi, TCL, Sony, Fire TV, LG, and also one or two projectors," wrote this developer on a donation website, which links to the project's homepage.
This solution does not require obtaining the root permissions for the television, and if such permissions were needed, it would not prevent users from reverting the device to its factory default settings.
At the same time, the dumbtv solution has completed end-to-end testing on the Android / Google TV platform on Fire TV Edition TVs, as well as on TVs from Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense, Xiaomi, and Shield. When using this cracking method, developers recommend pointing your preferred AI proxy to the dumbtv repository on GitHub.
However, it should be noted that these solutions are still in the development stage, and many users are testing them on different television platforms, while also providing suggestions for updates and fixes.
However, individual users do not necessarily have to borrow the works of others from GitHub in order to complete this task.
In a recently popular post on X, Ryan Doyle explained that he simply sent the model information of his TV to Claude Code and asked, “Can you hack this TV?” Subsequently, this agent guided him through the process step by step, allowing him to remove advertisements and bulky software from the TV, speed up the laggy user interface, and customize the screen saver, he claimed.
Doyle subsequently demonstrated in a video how fast and smoothly the new interface runs after AI made these modifications.
After seeing posts about people "modifying TVs using vibe-coding", user Mihir Gupta was also inspired and decided to give it a try themselves.
"An afternoon spent with Claude Code: 25 bloated applications were disabled, the original launcher of 192 MB was replaced with a custom launcher of 83 MB, and a carousel wallpaper was added," he wrote.
However, the ultimate results of these hacks may be mixed. Some people have found that Claude does not respond to their simple commands such as "turn off my TV," so they need more complex prompts. Others warn that using AI proxies may cause errors, potentially disabling important software packages or even damaging the system in the process. Some have reported that using Claude turned their system into a "brick," while another person got stuck halfway through cracking Fire TV.
For those who are concerned about completely cracking televisions using AI, there are already some solutions available on the market that can be used to customize smart TVs based on Android. For example, there are main screen replacement applications such as ATV Launcher, Projectivity Launcher, and FLauncher.
