For a reporter covering CES, the booth for Samsung Display can seem like a pure distillation of what the tech trade show is all about.CES has always been a celebration of screens, and every year Samsungs Display division, which manufactures screens for the entire industry, uses the show to flex its muscles. Visitors are practically guaranteed to see some astounding new display tech, with screens that bend, roll, or foldpossibly at the same timelong before they wind up in real products.So it was a bit jarring when Samsung Display declared that its focus for this years booth would be on AI instead, with Every DAI, OLED-AI as its official slogan. Chirag Shah, Samsung Displays senior director of marketing business development, told reporters that the combination of OLED displays and AI was akin to Penn and Teller or peanut butter and jelly.In real estate, the three most important words are, location, location, location, Shah said. I think its fair to say that today, in consumer electronics, the three most important words are AI, AI, and AI.Its an eye-roller, but heres the strangest part: The actual booth tour had nothing to do with AI. While Samsung showed off advancements in display brightness, durability, and flexibility, plus a wild new stretchable display that poked outward from the wall, AI wasnt involved with any of it. Samsung was merely making the tenuous argument that machine-generated content looks better on OLED screens, just as human-generated content would.This turned out to be a distillation of CES 2025 after all. Throughout the week, companies contorted themselves into promoting AI angles that were exaggerated, tangential to their core products, orin Samsung Displays casenonexistent. The effect was like gaslighting, with an endless repetition of AI aimed at making it seem inevitable even when the actual offerings felt empty.Reinventing the wheelTV makers, always searching for the next new gimmick, have naturally glommed onto AI as well, using it as a catch-all for anything that involves content recognition or predictive algorithms. The result is that AI now describes things that have existed in various forms for years now.Samsung, for instance, showed off how its TVs can understand what youre watching and suggest similar content, as if Automatic Content Recognition isnt already fueling the multibillion-dollar TV ad tech business. It also demonstrated an AI feature that tells you the names of actors on screen, 13 years after Amazon came out with X-Ray for its streaming video catalog.Meanwhile, LG is rebranding the remote on its 2025 TVs as an AI Remote, with an AI Concierge button that leads to personalized recommendations based on your watch and search historynot a new concept for anyone whos visited the home screen on a Google TV, Fire TV, or Apple TV streaming device. Holding the button down activates an AI Voice ID that tailors the recommendations to whoevers speaking, which again is something Apple TV devices started doing in 2022 (albeit without any AI branding).Some of these features could potentially be useful, but they arent entirely new inventions and they have little to do with the large language models that are responsible for all the AI hype today.AI PCs spin their wheelsAt last years CES, Intel made a big to-do about AI PCs, and began equipping its best laptop and desktop chips with neural processing units to handle offline AI tasks. It had a large showcase that demoed current and potential AI applications, and the company said it was working with more than 100 companies to develop new software.One year later, Intel is still shouting in press releases about the next era of AI computingreflecting similar messaging from AMD and Qualcommbut when I visited its 2025 CES showcase looking for examples on-device AI, I was told that it remains early days for the entire concept, and the demos on display were focused on basic text and image generation.Thats not stopping laptop makers from tossing the word AI into their product names, with models like the Acer Aspire 14 AI and MSI Stealth 18 HX AI (or, stranger still, the MSI Claw 8 AI+ handheld gaming device). What kinds of breakthrough features justify such naming? You can ask MSIs chatbot to optimize your games graphics settingssomething that graphics card software does alreadyor use Acers chat interface to navigate the instruction manual. For the most part these are just regular laptops with fancier names.Put a llama on itEven when companies had tangle examples of generative AI in their products, they often had a tacked-on quality, as if AI hardware requires nothing more than stuffing a generic large language model inside a menu somewhere.That was especially evident in smart glasses, which were inescapable on the show floor and in various press events. I wore several sets of these shades that promised to put an AI assistant in front of your eyes, but when I asked things like Where are the best tacos in Las Vegas, they only responded with bland disclaimers about how everyones tastes are subjective. (The answer, by the way, is Tacos El Gordo.)Delivering actual intelligence is harder, and is something even Google is struggling with as it fuses its action-oriented Google Assistant with the more conversational Gemini AI. A lot of the companies promising AI gadgets were doing just the bare minimum.Its a distractionAll this AI puffery may stem from a fundamental conflict within CES: Its a hardware show in a software world.Hardware makers want to demonstrate that theyre part of the AI revolution, but they dont make the AI themselves and are bound by the limits of what large language models can do (which is still far apart from what weve been promised they can do). Outside of a few stray announcements, like Nvidias $3,000 desktop AI computer for programmers, much of what happened at CES will have little direct bearing on where AI goes from here.All of which means that if you really want to understand whats happening at CES, you have to look past the AI stuff. Samsung is doing amazing things in its Display division, and the Electronics groups Frame Pro TVs are a big step forward in a growing product category. The three-way PC chip battle between Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm is delivering much slicker laptops with better battery life. I tried on several sets of glasses that do nothing but place a giant entertainment screen in front of your face, and found myself finally wanting one after years of sampling lesser versions.Device makers, in other words, are trying to take credit for the wrong thing. I left CES feeling upbeat about the state of consumer electronics, but with a strange feeling that I had to ignore a vast amount of its messaging to get there.