Twenty adults sit in a children’s library room in South Philadelphia, phones out, surrounded by picture books and tiny chairs. They’re not here for story time. They’re here because a librarian named Charlie Bailey is walking them through how to disable Apple Intelligence, kill Google Gemini’s auto-suggestions, and stop their email from drafting replies nobody asked for. The session is called “Avoiding AI.” It hit a waitlist before the event even filled. That frustration is now filling library waiting lists across the country.
The Workshop Nobody Expected to Go Viral
Demand for AI opt-out classes is outpacing traditional tech programming by a striking margin.
Bailey’s Instagram post promoting the workshop pulled more than 2,000 likes and 220 shares. Typical library event posts get a few dozen. He had to schedule a second session. In Bangor, Maine, librarian Hannah Cyrus capped registration at 30, added a waitlist, then streamed via Zoom — still drawing roughly 70 participants per session, according to TechCrunch reporting. Her standard Intro to Computers class? Maybe a dozen takers.
Cyrus wrote a journal article about the format; dozens of librarians worldwide reached out for her materials. She told TechCrunch she’d never seen that kind of response for any previous class.
Bailey’s sessions cover concrete steps:
- Disabling Apple Intelligence and Gemini on smartphones
- Turning off auto-generated text in email
- Hiding AI-generated summaries in search results
- Restricting personal data from being used to train AI models
- A folk hack surfaced by an attendee — appending “&udm=14” to a Google search URL strips out AI results, written on the board right next to the teen Wi-Fi login
“As an information professional, it feels good to see people skeptical of AI… helping people reclaim their autonomy over whether they want to use AI tools,” Bailey told AI Weekly.
Not Anti-Tech. Anti-Coercion.
Attendees distinguish sharply between AI they choose and AI that’s chosen for them.
Framing matters here. Cyrus herself uses AI-powered optical character recognition to digitize old library documents. Attendees acknowledge AI’s potential in medicine. But they resent data centers sprouting near their homes, AI “shoved down my throat at work,” and features that summarize a one-sentence email like it’s a legal brief.
This isn’t technophobia. It’s the same energy as unsubscribing from every newsletter a retailer auto-enrolled you in — except the stakes involve your data and your autonomy.
Cyrus suggested to TechCrunch that forced AI adoption “might be the straw that’s breaking the camel’s back,” crystallizing years of growing frustration that tech companies hold “an outsized influence over us” and constrain users from engaging with tools on their own terms.
If public libraries — trusted, non-corporate, civically embedded — become the institutional home for AI opt-out education, Big Tech faces something it hasn’t encountered before: not a protest, but infrastructure. The definition of “tech literate” just got considerably more complicated.
