Incredible. What a shit idea.
Anyways, kids, remember: never let your smart devices talk to the internet. We actually love our LG OLED - it's fantastic hardware. But it has not once, and never will, get the chance to phone home.
But what do you use instead? The onboard apps work well and having two remotes always sucked.
Thanks to HDMI-CEC you can control additional media players with your TV's remote. Sometimes it might not be perfect for things like long presses and stuff, but for basic controls it works.
That's my experience with an Nvidia Shield and a Raspberry with KODI. I wouldn't really recommend the Raspberry though.
So long as the GabeCube is at a decent price it is going to be my TV's media center. My old plan of building a new main rig and repurposing my old rig with an arc B580 upgrade went out the window for my budget when ram prices went through the roof.
A separate box with apps that work better and just use the one remote.
I use an Apple TV with mine. You can control the TV and soundbar from its one small remote.
I only use the Nvidia Shield remote. It obviously does everything on the Shield, plus tv on/off, and volume. Then I remapped the Netflix button on it to open a little quick actions menu to select brightness/picture mode levels.
Haven't touched the lg remote since
Totally worth mentioning, some LG OLED TVs are able to be jailbroken and run homebrew software!
It can block firmware updates and telemetry, so no spying and no surprise "feature" additions.
Who’s going to step up and start creating a “dumb” version of absolutely everything? One brand dedicated to just making the thing do the thing it absolutely must do and nothing else.
Would be great but the manufacturer would be at a disadvantage because that bundled bullshit effectively subsidizes the device. So you'd have to either raise prices or accept a lower profit margin.
Due to the high barrier of entry (e.g. because of patents) it's unlikely that a privately owned company can make a big market entry, especially across countries. And a public company will be forced by the shareholders to maximize profit so either you bundle crapware or they fire you as CEO.
Of course if you look outside the TV market such devices already exist. High-quality digital signage devices can easily be had – for about three times the price of an equivalently-sized TV.
Some premium brands like Bang & Olufsen sell TVs without adware, I think Panasonic TVs are mostly ad-free for now. Outside of that, most big brands will have "professional" or "commercial" product lines that also don't have ads. But in all cases you'll have to pay extra over the TVs subsidized by ads.
pay extra over the TVs subsidized by ads.
Let's be very clear, they are not and never were "subsidised by ads". Ads just became a new way to extract more money from customers.
If you root your lg oled you can truly block automatic updates. You can also install ad free youtube with sponsorblock integrated plus a bunch of other stuff that is of varying utility depending on your use case.
In general though just don’t connect it to the internet and get a $100 box for jellyfin from china (ugoos am6b+ works great and can playback basically anything but av1 natively if you flash Coreelec, the android side can still run streaming apps if you insist or iptv apps like tv mate since iptv support in kodi/jellyfin suuuucks).
Lg has proven they don’t respect consent by silently opting you in to data collection with updates. The updates never add features or bug fixes, just ugly UI changes and shit like this. It’s almost never worth updating unless someone is specifically saying “you should update, it fixes/adds ____
In the future don’t support them but at the same time it’s the “who the fuck can you support/oh you use an iphone under capitalism” problem. Yeah you don’t need a big tv, you don’t need an oled, you can buy a far more expensive commercial display, etc. I dunno
The controversy centers on a Reddit post in the r/mildlyinfuriating subreddit, where a user lamented the unexpected addition of Copilot following an automatic update. The post, which garnered thousands of upvotes and comments, describes the AI tool appearing as a non-deletable app on the TV’s interface.
"Widespread backlash" 🙄
Needs to be illegal.
This, this finally made me reach back my LG TV and disconnected the Ethernet cable.
I need someone to explain to me, what situation could possibly arise that would require me to use Copilot on my fucking TV?
This shit is why more people now have dabbled in DNS blocking and vlans. Its "your" equipment but you need to literally treat it as hostile.
I'll throw my money at any TV manfucturer that just sells me a dumb OLED TV with great picture quality. Heck, even drop the speakers, I won't be using them anyway. Just a dumb panel with plenty of input/outputs.
Then follows a class action lawsuit because the AI exposed children to unsuitable materials and the thing is gone the next update.
"""gone"""
So glad I blocked my LG C1 from the internet ages ago. Haven't received updates in forever, don't care. It's a TV, it shows pictures. I even still have it LAN enabled so it can be controlled via Home Assistant automations, it just can never leave the home network, and that's how I like it.
I can't even remember how long ago I set it up to do this, I think it was when I heard rumor they'd be including ads in the UI, maybe 2023 or so.
Irony is LG has their own open weights AI: Exaone 32B.
https://huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE
It’s… not terrible. Especially for a multilingual, locally runnable one. But they gave it a license from the depths of hell, that even forbids reverse engineering and basically claims all its outputs, so no one uses it.
https://huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE/EXAONE-4.0.1-32B/blob/main/LICENSE
Anyway, I find it darkly hilarious that they choose to snub their own research, and their Tenstorrent partnership, and shove copilot in instead. How much you wanna bet they namedrop OpenAI in their earnings report?
This is corporate enshittification at its purest.
It seems TV aren't even owner by the owners anymore. I don't watch TV nor game anymore but seeing the amount of ads when just turning on tvs at friends houses is wild and now with this it's doing way too much to just be a display. Whoever decides to start making dumb tvs again at mass with all the newer tech like hdr and dolby atmos in it will have a booming business but I guess no residuals after the sale no unlimited growth for investors.
I got my mom an iPad, apparently AI is unavoidable in setup. To finish setup, you must agree to Apple AI.
They are all doing it together. I can't keep track of who owns what, perhaps "they" are all actually owned by the same megacorp.
This comes up a lot, and I don't necessarily get it. I have all smart TVs, and I just never, ever, EVER let them connect to wifi even ONCE for any reason. It's not like it NEEDS it for anything.
It’s not like it NEEDS it for anything.
I see this take online a lot, but in person, everywhere I go people play netflix and whatever directly on their TV. I think there might just be a huge divide in perspective between those with and without game consoles of some sort always connected to their TV.
Oh, the same company that screenshots your content even if you use it as a dumb display? Who could've predicted this!
At some point we'd have to start importing TVs from the other side of the Great Chinese Firewall to avoid unwanted US tech. It's getting ridiculous.
LG's recent software update has forcibly installed Microsoft Copilot, an AI assistant, on smart TVs without removal options, sparking widespread user backlash over privacy, bloatware, and loss of control. This highlights growing tensions in smart devices, where monetization often overrides user preferences.
Sure is ironic that the article summary is itself AI-generated.
FYI, it won't let you delete Alexa either. I hate that fucking thing.
Easy way to never get this. Don’t connect the tv to internet. Literally get an Apple TV or fire stick or something else as a media player.
What does LG even get out of this?
M$ is probably paying them handsomely for it.
one of the many prices you pay letting a "Smart" TV connect to the internet.
clankers should be segregated from society. oh and to the hexbear people: "clanker" is technically NOT a slur. seriously!
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
