Librarians are hosting viral ‘Avoiding AI’ workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech

“Everyone is on their phone during my show!” joked Charlie Bailey, a librarian in South Philadelphia. He just asked his audience to get out their phones so he can walk them through the steps to disable Apple Intelligence and Gemini.

Bailey is standing at the front of a library room set up for children. The focal point is the vibrant rug he stands on, which reminds us that M stands for “moon” and Z stands for “zebra.” But the twenty or so adults in the room aren’t here to learn about the alphabet. They are at a workshop called Avoiding AI, which in this context does not stand for ‘apple’ and ‘igloo’.

“I was inspired by people’s sense of frustration as AI tools are kind of being forced upon them, and the sense that AI tools we didn’t ask for are suddenly everywhere in our lives,” Bailey told TechCrunch.

Bailey starts the hour-long workshop with an overview of how AI chatbots and other consumer AI tools work, explaining why people might want to use these products, and why they might choose to abstain. It then walks through all the popular tech platforms and devices and shows step-by-step instructions on the projector to guide people through how to disable specific features.

“As a librarian, I think it’s important to see this as advancing digital literacy and helping people reclaim their autonomy over whether they want to use AI tools,” Bailey said. “It’s important, especially when it can be so difficult not to use them, and when the design seems to force adoption.”

Bailey got the idea for the Avoiding AI workshop from Hannah Cyrus, a librarian in Maine. He was one of dozens of librarians from around the world who contacted Cyrus after she published a magazine article about developing her own workshop.

“This has never happened before with anything I’ve worked on,” Cyrus told TechCrunch. “No one has ever emailed me and said, ‘Can you give me your Intro to Computers slides?'”

At the Bangor Public Library, patrons turn to Cyrus when they need help with all things technology.

“I started getting questions more and more about: ‘How can I turn this around? [AI] stuff out? Why does it try to write my emails for me? Why is it trying to summarize my one-sentence email that I can easily read?'” Cyrus said. “I just decided that with so much media hype about AI products it would be a good opportunity to educate people on the basics of what happens when you use this technology, and then explore how to disable it if you don’t want to use it.”

Normally, Cyrus’s classes, such as Intro to Computers, draw about a dozen participants. But so many people showed interest in her first Avoiding AI workshop that she had to cancel registration at 30 people, open a waitlist and share the workshop on Zoom. Including the livestream, approximately 70 people attended Cyrus’ first two workshops.

When Bailey followed Cyrus’ example and organized a workshop in Philadelphia, the reception was also unprecedented. The one from the library Instagram post about the event ‘Avoiding AI’ received more than 2,000 likes and 220 shares, while most of the library’s posts receive no more than a few dozen likes. He planned a second program because the first one received too many applications.

“As an information professional, it feels good to see people being skeptical of AI,” says Bailey. “It felt really good to see how many people share this feeling.”

During the workshop, there is a sense of camaraderie in the room of strangers. When Bailey invites participants to share their own tips, one person explains that adding “&udm=14” to a Google search will hide the AI ​​results. Bailey writes the string of characters on a whiteboard next to the login information for the teen Wi-Fi server.

“In today’s world you have to go through all the trouble to buy a house, and in two years there could be a data center next to your house,” says Johnny, a workshop participant.

“I keep having AI shoved down my throat at work, and every time I see it I think about the environment,” adds another participant, Gabrielle. But she doesn’t completely write off AI as technology either. “I am not against AI when it comes to medical breakthroughs.”

AI naysayers know that this technology is much broader than just chatbots and deepfake apps. Cyrus talked about how useful optical character recognition is for scanning old documents in the library. But for her and the people who attend her workshops, the anti-AI movement is less about rejecting technology and more about advocating more control, choice and freedom in the way people use technology.

“I think the forced adoption of AI on people’s devices could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back in some ways,” she says. “There has been a growing realization for some time that these products and the companies that make them have an outsized influence on us, and that we are not really using these products in the ways we would like.”