Would AI TVs taking over Smart TVs be 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 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…