“Everybody’s on their phone on my schedule!” jokes Charlie Bailey, a librarian in South Philadelphia. He simply asked his audience to take out their phones so he could walk them through the steps to disable Apple Intelligence and Gemini.
Bailey stands in front of a library classroom outfitted for children – the focal point being the living rug he stands on, which reminds us that M is for ‘moon’ and Z is for ‘zebra’. But the 20 adults in the room aren’t here to learn about the alphabet. They’re in a lab called Avoiding AI, which, in this context, doesn’t mean ‘apple’ and ‘igloo’.
“I was inspired by the feeling of people’s frustration with AI tools that kind of force them, and I feel like AI tools that we didn’t ask for are suddenly everywhere in our lives,” Bailey told TechCrunch.
Bailey begins 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 not to. It then walks through all the most popular tech platforms and devices, showing step-by-step instructions on the projector to guide people in turning off specific features.
“As a librarian, I think it’s important to look at this as promoting digital literacy and helping people reclaim their autonomy about 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 dictate their 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 her publication magazine article for the development of her own laboratory.
“This has never happened before with anything I’ve worked on,” Cyrus told TechCrunch. “No one has ever emailed me like, ‘Can you give me your Intro to Computers slides?’
At the Bangor Public Library, patrons turn to Cyrus when they need help with anything related to technology.
“Increasingly, I was getting questions about how I can turn this around [AI] things away? Why is it trying to write my emails for me? Why is he trying to condense my email into one sentence that I can easily read?” Cyrus said. “I just decided that with so much hype about AI products, it would be a good opportunity to teach people about the basics of what happens when you use this technology, and then deal with how to turn it off if you don’t want to use it.”
Typically, Cyrus’ classes like Intro to Computers have about a dozen participants. But so many people expressed interest in her first Avoiding AI workshop that she had to cut registration to 30 people, open a waiting list and share the workshop on Zoom. Including the live stream, about 70 people attended each of Cyrus’ first two workshops.
When Bailey followed Cyrus’ example to host a workshop in Philadelphia, the reception was similarly unprecedented. The library Post on Instagram about the “Avoiding AI” event garnered over 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 one was oversubscribed.
“As an information professional, it’s gratifying to see people skeptical of AI,” Bailey said. “It felt really good to see how many people shared that feeling.”
There is a sense of camaraderie amongst the room of strangers during the workshop. 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 table next to the login credentials for the teenage Wi-Fi server.
“You have to go through all the hassle of buying a house in today’s world, and two years from now, there could be a data center next to your house,” says one of the workshop participants named Johnny.
“I keep getting AI shoved down my throat at work and every time I see it, I think about the environment,” adds another attendee named Gabrielle. But it also doesn’t completely write off AI as a technology. “I’m not against artificial intelligence when it comes to medical breakthroughs.”
AI deniers know that this technology is much broader than just chatbots and deepfake apps. Cyrus mentioned how useful OCR is for scanning old documents in the library. But for her and the people who go to her workshops, the anti-AI movement isn’t so much about rejecting technology altogether as it is about advocating for more control, power and freedom in how people use technology.
“I think forcing the adoption of AI into people’s devices might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back in a way,” he said. “Awareness has been growing for a long time that these products and these companies that make them have a huge influence on us and that we’re not really using these products the way we’d like to.”
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