Librarians host viral “Avoid AI” workshops for people fed up with big tech companies

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

Billy stands at the front of the children’s library classroom – 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 20 people in the room aren’t here to learn the alphabet. They’re in a workshop called “Avoiding AI,” which in this context doesn’t mean “apple” and “igloo.”

“I was inspired by people’s frustration with AI tools that were forced on them, and the feeling that AI tools that we didn’t ask for were suddenly everywhere in our lives,” Bailey told TechCrunch.

Billy begins the hour-long workshop with an overview of how AI chatbots and other consumer AI tools work, explaining why people want to use these products, and why they might choose to abstain. It then walks through all the most popular tech platforms and devices, displaying step-by-step instructions on the monitor to walk people through turning off certain features.

“As a librarian, I think it’s important to see this as promoting digital literacy and helping people regain their autonomy over whether or not they want to use AI tools,” Bailey said. “It’s important, especially when it’s so hard not to use it, and when the design seems to dictate dependence.”

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 newspaper article about the development of her 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 slides for computers?’

At the Bangor Public Library, patrons turn to Cyrus when they need help with anything technology-related.

“More and more, I was getting questions about, ‘How can I turn this around?’ [AI] Stuff off? Why is he trying to write his emails to me? “Why are you trying to summarize my one-sentence email that I can easily read?” Cyrus said. “I just decided that with so much media hype around AI products, it would be a good opportunity to teach people the basics of what happens when you use this technology, and then get into how to turn it off if you don’t want to use it.”

Typically, Cyrus’s classes such as Intro to Computers attract about a dozen attendees. But so many people expressed interest in her first workshop on Avoiding AI that she had to cut registration at 30 people, open a waiting list, and share the workshop on Zoom. Including the livestream, about 70 people attended each of Cyrus’ first two workshops.

When Bailey followed Cyrus’s lead to host a workshop in Philadelphia, the reception was similarly unprecedented. The library’s Instagram post about the “Avoid AI” event received more than 2,000 likes and 220 shares, while most library posts don’t get more than a few dozen likes. He scheduled a second program because the first had too many registrations.