Microsoft Copilot has officially landed on LG TVs via a recent webOS update, but the rollout feels more like bloatware than breakthrough. Reddit threads lit up with complaints about the app being pinned to home screens without consent, and the reality is that Copilot’s usefulness on a TV is questionable at best.
Over the weekend, LG smart TV owners noticed something new after updating their sets: a shiny Microsoft Copilot tile sitting alongside Netflix and YouTube. The catch? You can’t uninstall it. A Reddit post on r/mildlyinfuriating showing the Copilot icon quickly went viral, racking up tens of thousands of upvotes and sparking a flood of comments from frustrated users.
LG has been touting its “AI TV” strategy since CES 2025, promising smarter recommendations and voice-driven search powered by Microsoft’s AI. But what users actually got was a shortcut to a web-based Copilot interface, not a deeply integrated feature. And because it’s treated as a system app, it can only be hidden, not removed.
Let’s be blunt: Copilot on a TV sounds futuristic, but in practice it’s clunky. LG’s webOS interface is notoriously sluggish, and adding another layer of AI doesn’t magically fix that. To use Copilot, you have to navigate away from whatever you’re watching, open the app, and then type or speak your query. That’s a lot of friction compared to just pulling out your phone or asking a smart speaker.
Imagine pausing your movie to ask Copilot about the director or to recommend similar films. By the time you’ve slogged through the menus, the mood is gone. Copilot becomes a secondary app competing with your primary reason for owning a TV, watching content.
The backlash isn’t just about inconvenience. It’s about control. LG, like other TV makers, has been steadily turning smart TVs into ad platforms and data collectors. Copilot feels like another step in that direction: an AI assistant bundled in whether you want it or not, with potential hooks into personalization and tracking features like LG’s “Live Plus”.
The comparison some Redditors made to Apple’s infamous U2 album drop isn’t far off. It’s not that Copilot is inherently bad, it’s that it was forced onto users without choice. And when the payoff is minimal (slow UI, secondary app, questionable utility), the frustration outweighs the novelty.
Microsoft Copilot on LG TVs is a neat demo of AI everywhere, but realistically, it’s more hassle than help. Between sluggish navigation, lack of deep integration, and the fact that most people already have faster devices for AI queries, Copilot risks becoming yet another unused tile on the home screen. Unless LG finds a way to make Copilot contextually useful without pulling viewers out of their content, this update feels less like innovation and more like bloatware dressed up as progress.
