You bought a television, and somewhere along the way it became an advertising billboard that also shows films. Now a few developers have asked AI coding assistants to fix that, and the results are, by the standards of the genre, actually useful.
Two projects, dumbtv and cleanyourtv, aim to clear ads and unwanted preinstalled apps from smart TVs. Both were built with help from AI models, and both promise a quieter, faster home screen with only the apps you chose.
The problem nobody ordered
The pitch is simple. A modern smart TV arrives with manufacturer ads on the main screen, apps you did not request and updates you did not ask for. The interface gets slower, the home screen gets louder, and the person who has to live with it is often not the person who bought it.
That last point is how one of these projects started.
cleanyourtv: a family tech-support project
The creator of cleanyourtv says the idea came from being fed up with the ads on his parents' television. He handed the job to Claude Code, asking it to clean up the system and build a home screen containing only the apps that mattered.
The tool works remotely, over Wi-Fi, and targets devices running Android TV and Google TV. It can disable apps you do not need and swap the stock interface for a simpler launcher that, per the report, resembles the Apple TV look.
He published his instructions on GitHub. By his own account, several thousand people tried to repeat the process within two days, on sets from Xiaomi, TCL, Sony, LG and other brands.
Treat that figure with the usual caution. It is the author's own count, and the report offers no independent confirmation. It also lists LG among the brands without saying how the process applies there, given that the tool is described as aimed at Android TV and Google TV.
dumbtv: ads, tracking and surprise updates
The second project, dumbtv, has a slightly broader brief. It is meant to rid a television of manufacturer ads, viewing tracking and unwanted updates.
Its compatibility list is fairly specific:
- Fire TV Edition sets.
- Android TV or Google TV devices from Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense and Xiaomi.
The author, Muzzammil Yaseen Sabuwala, says he used several AI models, DeepSeek and Claude among them.
Two practical details matter here. The tool does not need root access, which keeps the barrier to entry lower and the risk of breaking something lower still. And if things go wrong, you can restore factory settings. For a tool that edits a device the whole household depends on, that safety net is not a minor feature.
Why people care about more than ads
Ads are the visible irritation. The less visible one is automatic content recognition, or ACR.
ACR is technology that identifies what is on screen by analysing images, audio and digital fingerprints. The resulting data can be used to personalise advertising and can be passed to advertising partners. In other words, the television is not only showing you ads, it may also be taking notes on what you watched in order to sell you better ones.
The report does not claim that either tool switches off ACR specifically. It frames the wider point: being able to turn off features of this kind hands users back some control over their own devices.
What this actually shows
The interesting part is not that an AI model can write a script. It is who is now writing them. One developer was solving a family annoyance and one was building a tool for a list of mainstream brands, and in both cases an assistant did a lot of the heavy lifting.
That is a mild but real shift. Cleaning a locked-down consumer gadget used to be a hobby for people who enjoyed reading forum threads at midnight. With a coding assistant, the same job becomes a prompt, a repository and a set of instructions that thousands of strangers can follow.
There are limits to what can be said from this report. It does not describe the methods in technical detail, does not report independent testing, and gives no numbers beyond the author's own claim about uptake. What it does establish is that the tools exist, which platforms they target, that they work without root and that a factory reset is the escape hatch.
The practical takeaway
If you are tempted, a few sensible habits apply. Check that your TV runs Android TV, Google TV or Fire TV Edition. Read the project's instructions before touching anything. Remember that reset option exists, and use it if the result is worse than the original.
And perhaps ask whether the most telling feature of a smart TV in 2026 is that the first thing its owner does is hire a chatbot to make it dumber.