Librarians run viral workshops teaching people to 'avoid AI' and switch it off on their devices

An article in TechCrunch (Amanda Silberling, 25 July 2026) describes a phenomenon that is growing in public libraries: workshops called "Avoiding AI", designed to teach the public how to switch off artificial intelligence tools on their phones and devices, rather than how to use them.

The report follows Charlie Bailey, a librarian in South Philadelphia, who runs a one-hour session in which he first explains in general terms how AI chatbots and other consumer tools work, why someone might want to use them and why someone might prefer not to. He then walks through, step by step and projected on a screen, the main technology platforms and devices to show how to disable specific features, including Apple Intelligence and Gemini. Bailey explains that the idea grew out of people's frustration at feeling that AI tools nobody asked for are being imposed on them everywhere, and argues that teaching this is a form of digital literacy and a way of giving people back their autonomy over whether or not they use AI.

Bailey was inspired by Hannah Cyrus, a librarian in Bangor, Maine, who published an academic article about the workshop she developed herself and was then contacted by dozens of librarians from around the world asking for materials — something that, she says, had never happened to her with any other project. Cyrus says that at the Bangor library she was fielding more and more questions from patrons about how to turn off AI features and why the system was trying to write their emails or summarize one-sentence messages they could perfectly well read themselves. Faced with the flood of media coverage of AI products, she decided to create a workshop that explained the basics of the technology and then how to switch it off for anyone who did not want to use it.

The success surprised both librarians. Cyrus's regular classes, such as "Introduction to Computing", typically draw a dozen people; her first two "Avoiding AI" workshops had to close registration at 30 attendees, open a waiting list and stream over Zoom, reaching about 70 people each counting the live broadcast. In Philadelphia, the Instagram post announcing Bailey's workshop drew more than 2,000 likes and 220 shares, far above the few dozen the library's usual posts receive; he had to schedule a second session because the first filled up with registrations.

The article also captures the atmosphere and the audience's contributions during Bailey's workshop: there is a sense of camaraderie among strangers, and at one point an attendee shares the trick of adding "&udm=14" to the end of a Google search to hide AI-generated results, a tip Bailey writes on the whiteboard next to the wifi credentials for teenagers. Among the accounts cited, an attendee named Johnny voices his concern that, after all the effort of buying a home, a data center could appear next door within two years; another attendee, Gabrielle, says she feels AI is constantly being "imposed" on her at work and that every time she sees it she thinks about the environmental impact, though she clarifies that she does not reject the technology wholesale, since she is not against AI applied to medical advances.

Both Cyrus and the article itself stress that the movement is not about rejecting technology as a whole: Cyrus mentions how useful optical character recognition (OCR) is for digitizing old documents at the library. The central idea, as she explains, is that the forced adoption of AI on people's devices may be "the last straw" after a growing awareness of the outsized influence these big tech companies wield over users, who feel they are not using these products in the way they would really want to.

Taken together, the article portrays an incipient cultural phenomenon with viral reach: public libraries acting as spaces for critical literacy about AI, where the goal is not technological aversion per se, but regaining the ability to choose in the face of product design that, according to the attendees and librarians quoted, pushes adoption by default.