“Everyone’s on their cell phones on my show!” joked Charlie Bailey, a librarian in South Philadelphia. He just asked viewers to pull out their phones to walk him through the steps to disable Apple Intelligence and Gemini.
Bailey stands in front of a library classroom set up for children. The focal point is the bright rug on which he stands. This reminds us that M stands for “moon” and Z stands for “zebra.” But the two dozen adults in this room aren’t here to learn about the alphabet. They’re attending a workshop called “Avoiding AI,” which in this context doesn’t stand for “apple” or “igloo.”
“I was inspired by the frustration people have with AI tools being thrust upon them, and how suddenly it feels like AI tools that we didn’t ask for are popping up everywhere in our lives,” Bailey told TechCrunch.
Bailey will begin the hour-long workshop with an overview of how AI chatbots and other consumer AI tools work, and explain why people want to use these products and why they should refrain from using them. The projector then walks you through all the most popular technology platforms and devices and provides step-by-step instructions on how to turn off certain features.
“As librarians, I think it’s important to think of this as something that improves digital literacy and helps people regain autonomy over whether or not they use AI tools,” Bailey said. “This is especially important when it is very difficult not to use them or when the design seems to force their adoption.”
Bailey got the idea for the AI avoidance 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 in anything I’ve ever worked on,” Cyrus told TechCrunch. “No one emails me and says, ‘Can you show me the slides for Introduction to Computers?'”
At the Bangor Public Library, patrons turn to Silas when they need help with anything technology-related.
“We’re getting more questions like, ‘How do I turn off this (AI) feature? Why is the AI trying to write emails for me? Why is it trying to condense my one-sentence emails so I can read them more easily?'” Cyrus said. “With so much hype in the media about AI products, we decided it was a good time to educate people on the basics of what’s going on when they use this technology, and how to turn it off if they don’t want to use it.”
Cyrus’ classes, such as Introduction to Computers, typically have about 12 participants. But so many people expressed interest in her first AI Evasion Workshop that she had to close registration at 30 people, create a waiting list, and share the workshop over Zoom. Including the livestream, Silas’s first two workshops each had about 70 participants.
When Bailey followed Silas to a workshop in Philadelphia, he received a similarly unprecedented reception. The library’s Instagram post about the “Avoid AI” event received more than 2,000 likes and 220 shares, but most of the library’s posts did not receive more than a few dozen likes. The first program was oversubscribed, so he planned a second one.
“As an information professional, it feels good to see people being skeptical about AI,” Bailey said. “It was really gratifying to see so many people sharing this sentiment.”
Having strangers in a room during a workshop creates a sense of camaraderie. When Bailey encouraged participants to share their tips, one person explained that adding “&udm=14” to a Google search would hide the AI results. Bailey writes down a string on the whiteboard next to the teen’s Wi-Fi server login credentials.
“In today’s world, you have to go through all the trouble to buy a house, and in two years you might have a data center next to your house,” says one workshop participant named Johnny.
“I frequently have AI shoved down my throat at work, and every time I see it I think about the environment,” added another attendee named Gabriel. But she doesn’t completely dismiss AI as a technology either. “I’m not against AI in terms of medical advancement.”
AI deniers know that this technology is much broader than just chatbots and deepfake apps. Cyrus mentioned how optical character recognition is useful when scanning old documents in libraries. But for her and the people attending her workshops, the anti-AI movement is not about rejecting technology entirely, but about asserting more control, agency, and freedom over how people use it.
“I think forcing people to put AI into their devices may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back in some ways,” she says. “There has been a growing recognition for a long time that these products and the companies that make them have tremendous influence over us, and that we are not actually using them in the ways we would like.”
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