Librarians Are Teaching Americans to Switch Off AI — and the Rooms Are Packed

Free sessions called “Avoiding AI” are catching on at libraries across the United States. In them, adult participants learn how to switch off the artificial-intelligence features that tech companies build into smartphones and services without asking. Demand for the workshops, organizers say, has been unprecedented.

From the kids' rug to grown-up problems

Charlie Bailey, a librarian in South Philadelphia, holds his hour-long class in a room designed for children: he stands on a bright alphabet rug where “M” is for “moon” and “Z” is for “zebra.” But the two dozen adults who have shown up aren't there for their ABCs. Bailey starts by explaining how AI chatbots and consumer AI tools work, why people use them and why they might opt out, and then projects step-by-step instructions for turning off the relevant features — Apple Intelligence and Gemini, for example.

According to Bailey, the idea grew out of a shared frustration: AI tools no one asked for had suddenly turned up everywhere. He sees the work as part of building digital literacy and a way to give people back the right to decide for themselves whether to use such services.

From Maine to Philadelphia

Bailey borrowed the idea from Hannah Cyrus, a librarian in Maine. After she published an article about her own workshop, dozens of colleagues from around the world reached out to her. “That has never happened with any of my projects before,” Cyrus admitted. People used to ask her mostly how to turn a computer on; now they ask how to turn off the AI that tries to write their emails and summarize one-sentence messages.

While a typical class like “Intro to Computers” might draw about a dozen people, the first “Avoiding AI” workshop had to cap registration at thirty, open a waitlist, and stream on Zoom — counting the online audience, about seventy people tuned in. In Philadelphia, the library's Instagram post racked up more than two thousand likes, against its usual few dozen, and Bailey had to schedule a second session.

Not against technology, but for control

The room has the feel of solidarity among strangers. One participant shares a hack: adding the string “&udm=14” to a Google search strips the AI results out of the results page. Others talk about the environmental costs of data centers and about AI being forced on them at work.

At the same time, the organizers stress that the movement isn't against technology as such. Cyrus points out how useful optical character recognition is, for instance, when digitizing old documents, and one attendee notes that she has nothing against AI in medical research. This is about something else — the wish to control for themselves how and when they use technology. For many people, Cyrus believes, having AI imposed on them was the last straw.

Source: TechCrunch