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