- Step 1: add AI to everything
- Step 2: …
- Step 3: profit!
Many years ago, The Blackout Crew had a hit with a song urging us to “put a donk on it“. And now LG and Samsung are doing something similar, but instead of a song it’s a TV, and the donk is AI.
Both Samsung and LG are seemingly leaning hard on AI to sell you a new TV this year, and they’re both doing it with Microsoft‘s Copilot, as well as with their own AI features.
AI isn’t new to TVs: it’s become a catch-all term for smart systems that take care of things such as audio and video upsampling. And the AI in the two firms’ 2025 TVs seems to come in two flavors: things that might improve your TV experience, and an AI app that might just tell you to put glue in pizza (AI Overviews, we’re looking at you there).
What are LG and Samsung doing with AI In their 2025 TVs?
Samsung calls its AI features Samsung Vision AI, and this year it’ll be coming to TVs including the Neo QLED, OLED, QLED and The Frame models. The goal, Samsung says, is to make TVs aware of their surroundings, adaptive to user preferences and “autonomous in delivering intuitive features”.
In practice that means better integration with SmartThings plus three key features: Live Translate, for real-time subtitle translations; AI-generated wallpaper; and Click To Search to tell you more about who or what is on screen. And as before it means dynamically optimized visuals based on what you’re watching and how much light there is in the room where you’re watching it.
As for Copilot, Samsung says it’ll “enable users to explore a wide range of Copilot services, including personalized content recommendations.” There’s no more detail at the moment, which suggests it’s still some way off becoming a core part of the smart TV setup.
LG’s going down the AI-powered personalization route too. In addition to using algorithms to upsample lower-res and lower-quality visuals there’s AI-powered surround sound and a new name for the remote control: it’s now the AI Remote.
LG says your TV will greet you by name, provide tailored recommendations and detect different voices and adjust the on-screen suggestions accordingly. There’s AI Search, an AI Chatbot help system and once again, generative images and Copilot querying.
It’s easy to be cynical about the current AI hype – do we really want to burn the planet faster in order to make more images of people with six fingers? – and the AI prefix in tech marketing is starting to feel a bit like “cyber” or the “i” prefix did back in the bad old days. But AI audio and video upsampling and optimization is getting really good; I think it would be a shame if the more gimmicky stuff distracted from the genuinely useful things AI and machine learning can do for TVs in terms of improving what you actually see and hear.
