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LG Forces TV Owners To Use Microsoft ‘AI’ Copilot App You Can’t Uninstall And Nobody Asked For
from the our-sad-desperation-means-the-product-is-good dept
If your product is even a third as innovative and useful as you claim it is, you shouldn’t have to go around trying a little too hard to convince people. The product’s usefulness should speak for itself. And you definitely shouldn’t be forcing people to use products they’ve repeatedly told you they don’t actually appreciate or want.
LG and Microsoft learned that lesson recently when LG began installing Microsoft’s Copilot “AI” assistant on people’s televisions, without any way to disable it:
“According to affected users, Copilot appears automatically after installing the latest webOS update on certain LG TV models. The feature shows up on the home screen alongside streaming apps, but unlike Netflix or YouTube, it cannot be uninstalled.”
To be clear this isn’t the end of the world. Users can apparently “hide” the app, but people are still generally annoyed at the lack of control. Especially coming from two companies with a history of this sort of behavior.
Many people just generally don’t like Copilot, much like they didn’t really like a lot of the nosier features integrated into Windows 11. Or they don’t like being forced to use Copilot when they’d prefer to use ChatGPT or Gemini.
You only have to peruse this Reddit thread to get a sense of the annoyance. You can also head over to the Microsoft forums to get a sense of how Microsoft customers are very very tired of all the forced Copilot integration across Microsoft’s other products, even though you can (sometimes) disable the integration.
But “smart” TVs are already a sector where user choice and privacy take a backseat to the primary goal of collecting and monetizing viewer behavior. And LG has been at the forefront of disabling features if you try to disconnect from the internet. So there are justifiable privacy concerns raised over this tight integration (especially in America, which is too corrupt to pass even a baseline internet privacy law).
This is also coming on the heels of widespread backlash over another Microsoft “AI” feature, Recall. Recall takes screenshots of your PC’s activity every five seconds, giving you an “explorable timeline of your PC’s past,” that Microsoft’s AI-powered assistant, Copilot, can then help you peruse.
Here, again, there was widespread condemnation over the privacy implications of such tight integration. Microsoft’s response was to initially pretend to care, only to double down. It’s worth noting that Microsoft’s forced AI integration into its half-assed journalism efforts, like MSN, has also been a hot, irresponsible mess. So this is not a company likely to actually listen to its users.
It’s not like Microsoft hasn’t had some very intimate experiences surrounding the backlash of forcing products down customers’ throats. But like most companies, Microsoft knows U.S. consumer protection and antitrust reform has been beaten to a bloody pulp, and despite the Trump administration’s hollow and performative whining about the power of “big tech,” big tech giants generally have carte blanche to behave like assholes for the foreseeable future, provided they’re polite to the dim autocrats in charge.
Filed Under: ai, antitrust, consumers, copilot, pc, privacy, smart tvs, software
Companies: lg, microsoft
Comments on “LG Forces TV Owners To Use Microsoft ‘AI’ Copilot App You Can’t Uninstall And Nobody Asked For”
What do you expect?
Microsoft: Small and Flabby
LG: Low Grade.
Lets see.
SMART TV= Being Stuck with 1 smart interface, and 1/2 the time its PAINFUL to figure out.
WHY? And they are CHEAP, in many ways.
DUMB TV. Has some Top features, and many Inputs, and some outputs for audio.
Whats amazing, is those little Boxes from Roku, Amazon, Google, and a few others, that you can PLUG IN and have ALL or NONE.
DUMB TV cost more? WHY?
Its like Windows.
They Understand What is needed, but OVER do it. Windows was done, but PROGRAMMERS NEED JOBS. And tweek and twaddle with things to make them TO SMART, TO COMPLICATED, and 3-4 locations on the computer to DEAL with Audio, Video, Networking. Anything you want to do, has to many locations to FIND.
It used to be a nice clean interface.
Hey, remember last week when somebody told me I was wrong about people not wanting AI, because just look at how many people use Copilot?
Re: Ummm
Look up recent MS announcement.
BUT, DO THEY HAVE A CHOICE?
This is like Google search, and it Dont get, what you want, as there are 20 different meanings.
Re:
To be fair, it’s kind of both. There are some people who are using AI for things, and also companies like Microsoft shoving it into everything without asking if people want it (or even if they don’t), in pursuit of growth.
Sometimes it’s even the same person. I have been dabbling a bit, and I have to admit AI has been useful for coding. At the same time, I would really like Microsoft/Firefox etc to stop shoving things down my throat. If I want an AI feature I will turn it on myself.
Re: Re:
And it’s always difficult to figure out what people want, as opposed to things they’ll tolerate, things they need, etc. Like, reporters might say there are a lot of people who want jobs, in response to a well-attended job fair. But people tend to stop working when financially able, which suggests many probably never wanted them. If computer assistance can help someone half-ass a job they need but don’t want, maybe they’ll use it.
Re:
The AI enemas will continue until morale improves!
We have an LG from, like, 10 years ago. Still works fine. We’ve never once connected it to the Internet because we don’t trust the software, and I know things are exponentially worse now. We do have an internet-connected streaming device attached to it, for better or worse, but no way are we putting the TV itself online.
Re:
Ours is from about 15 years ago, doesn’t even have the ability to connect to the internet. LG in fact because, at least back then, they had good hardware.
I will never buy a “smart” TV. Even if you don’t connect them to the internet, you are left with a worse off “dumb” TV than a real monitor-only TV. Working with family’s TVs, The input switching is unreliable at the least.
Forced installation of Copilot will continue until appreciation is achieved
If you can’t avoid getting a ‘smart’ device the best you can do is to keep it as ‘dumb’ by never connecting it to the internet if at all possible, as moves like this make clear that the internet connection is not for the customer’s benefit.
Do a Bing search on “virginia certificate of rent paid.” Copilot answers very confidently but (as you can see from the sources it cites) it is 100% wrong.
Re:
There are lots of myths repeated so often that people are convinced they’re true. Like treating non-functional traffic signals as all-way stops, which came up recently. It’s easy to point to government traffic manuals saying to do it; newscasters and officials will say it during major power outages; but often there’s no actual legal requirement, and the actual legal status is the same as an uncontrolled intersection.
LG Copilot etc
Microsoft abandoned any real effort to respect its market when it moved away from the concept of user O/S ownership and pushed the app/tablet regime. Fortunately there are some good Linux distros to turn to, and signs of a growing migration are widespread as users reject mandatory flabware and loss of control.
The irony is that Microsoft appears to have forgotten how it created its success in the first place: by responding to user requests when Digital refused to adapt CP/M for the booming microcomputer market back in the dawn of time. LG would do well to remember Ozymandias and the inevitable fate of software empires.
And every LG smart TV owner will be added to stats which MS and OpenAI will pretend are willing and active users of CoPilot to try and keep the number going up.