Charlie Bailey, a librarian in South Philadelphia, joked “Everybody’s on their phone at my program!” before asking attendees to take out their devices so he could guide them through disabling Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini. The classroom is outfitted for children — a colorful rug where M stands for “moon” and Z for “zebra” — yet roughly twenty adults showed up not for the alphabet but for a workshop called Avoiding AI.
Bailey opens the hour‑long session with an explanation of how chatbots and other consumer AI tools function, why some people find them useful, and why others choose not to use them. He then projects step‑by‑step instructions for the most popular platforms and devices to show participants exactly how to turn off 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 told TechCrunch. He said this is especially important when product design appears to push adoption.
How the workshop model spread
Bailey says he got the idea from Hannah Cyrus, a librarian at Bangor Public Library in Maine. Cyrus published a journal article describing how she developed her own workshop, and afterward dozens of librarians from around the world contacted her for materials. “This has never happened before with anything I’ve worked on,” Cyrus told TechCrunch. “Nobody has ever been emailing me like, ‘Can you give me your Intro to Computers slides?’”
At the Bangor Public Library, patrons often turn to Cyrus for tech help. She began receiving more questions about how to turn AI features off: why systems try to write emails, or why they summarize short messages. That motivated her to teach both the basics of what happens when you use these technologies and concrete steps for opting out.
Usual “Intro to Computers” classes attract about a dozen attendees. Interest in Avoiding AI was much higher: Cyrus had to close registration at 30 people for the first session, open a waitlist, and broadcast the workshop on Zoom. Including the livestream, roughly 70 people attended each of her first two workshops.
Local reception and community reactions
When Bailey hosted a similar workshop in Philadelphia, demand was also unusually high. The library’s Instagram post about the event received more than 2,000 likes and 220 shares, whereas most posts typically get only a few dozen likes. Because the first session filled up quickly, Bailey scheduled a second program.
There was a sense of camaraderie among strangers in the room. When Bailey invited participants to share tips, one person noted that appending “&udm=14” to a Google search URL hides AI results; Bailey wrote the string on a whiteboard next to the teen Wi‑Fi login. Attendees raised a range of concerns: one named Johnny warned that the cost of buying a home today is high and that an adjacent data center could appear in a few years. Another participant, Gabrielle, said she keeps having AI “shoved” at her at work and worries about environmental impacts, though she did not reject AI across the board and acknowledged potential benefits in medical breakthroughs.
Not outright rejection, but demand for control
Organizers emphasize that the movement is not about fully rejecting technology. Cyrus pointed to optical character recognition as an example of an AI application that is useful for scanning archival materials. For her and many workshop participants, the aim is greater control and choice over how—and whether—consumer AI features are used.
“I think the forced adoption of AI on people’s devices might be the straw that’s breaking the camel’s back in some ways,” Cyrus said. She noted a growing awareness that the products and companies behind them exert outsized influence on daily life, and that people often feel they are not using these products in the ways they would prefer.
Conclusion
Library‑hosted Avoiding AI workshops aim to clarify how consumer AI tools operate and to provide practical instructions for disabling unwanted features. Initiated by Hannah Cyrus in Maine and replicated by librarians such as Charlie Bailey in Philadelphia, the sessions have seen unusually strong demand, indicating significant local interest in technological agency and the ability to opt out of built‑in AI functions.
