The latest use case for artificial intelligence? Dumbing down your smart TV to get rid of the bloat. Developers like Gathin T. and Muzammil Yasin Sabuwala have created solutions that strip sponsored ads, speed up the user interface and redesign the home screen, all with the help of AI.

One such solution, called “dumbtv,” describes its mission on its GitHub page thus: “Your TV should do what you paid for: your apps, your HDMI inputs, and nothing else. No ads from the TV itself, no watch tracking, no update you did not ask for.”

While hacking consumer electronics devices to gain more control over their systems is hardly a new idea, the latest advances in AI technology have made such efforts much more accessible to anyone. As the creator of cleanyourtv, Gathin T., puts it, the idea to clean up the smart TV interface started one afternoon when he got tired of seeing the ads on his parents’ TV set.

“I had Claude Code clean it up over Wi-Fi and build a simple home screen with just their apps on it. I put the prompt on GitHub, tweeted the before and after, and a few thousand people did the same to their own TVs over the next two days,” the developer wrote on a website for donations, linked from the project’s homepage.

The solution doesn’t require gaining root access to the TV, nor does it make it impossible to return to the factory default state, if desired. Meanwhile, the dumbtv solution has been tested end-to-end on a Fire TV Edition television set and Android/Google TV platforms on TVs from Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense, Xiaomi, and Shield. To use this hack, the developer suggests pointing your preferred AI agent at the dumbtv repository on GitHub.