The Librarian-Led Revolt: Why ‘Avoiding AI’ Workshops Are Going Viral

In a small library classroom in South Philadelphia, the alphabet rug underfoot might say “M is for Moon” and “Z is for Zebra,” but the twenty adults in the room aren’t here to learn their ABCs. They’re gathered for a different kind of lesson: how to opt out of the AI revolution.

These are the scenes from a new grassroots movement that’s quietly spreading across the country. Librarians those steadfast guardians of information and digital literacy are fighting back against the tech industry’s relentless push for AI adoption. Their weapon of choice? In-person workshops, a projector, and a very simple message: you don’t have to accept this technology if you don’t want to.

The Birth of a Movement

The “Avoiding AI” workshop phenomenon began with Hannah Cyrus, a librarian in Maine. Frustrated by the increasing number of patrons asking how to turn off AI features they never asked for, Cyrus developed a class to address their concerns.

“More and more, I was getting questions about, ‘How do I turn this [AI] stuff off? Why is it trying to write my emails for me? Why is it trying to summarize my one-sentence email that I can easily read?'” Cyrus told TechCrunch.

The response was overwhelming. While her typical “Intro to Computers” class draws about a dozen people, Cyrus’s first Avoiding AI workshop was so popular she had to cap registration at 30, open a waitlist, and offer a Zoom option. Including the livestream, approximately 70 people attended each of her first two sessions.

When Charlie Bailey, a librarian in South Philadelphia, picked up the torch, the reaction was even more striking. The library’s Instagram post about the event garnered over 2,000 likes and 220 shares far beyond their usual engagement numbers. Bailey had to schedule a second workshop immediately.

What Happens in an Avoiding AI Workshop

The hour-long session begins with an overview of how AI chatbots and consumer AI tools actually work. Bailey explains both why people might want to use these products and why they might prefer to abstain.

Then comes the hands-on part: attendees pull out their phones and follow along as Bailey projects step-by-step instructions on how to disable features like Apple Intelligence and Google’s Gemini. He shares tips like appending “&udm=14” to Google searches to hide AI results a trick one attendee taught the group that Bailey promptly wrote on his whiteboard.

But the workshops aren’t just tech tutorials. They’ve become community gatherings where people share their frustrations and concerns.

“I keep getting AI shoved down my throat at work, and every time I see it, I think about the environment,” shared one attendee named Gabrielle.

Another participant, Johnny, expressed anxiety about the physical infrastructure: “You have to go through all the trouble to buy a home in today’s world, and two years from now, there could be a data center next to your house.”

The Deeper Concerns

What’s driving this movement isn’t Luddism or technophobia. Both Cyrus and Bailey emphasize that they’re not against AI technology in all its forms Cyrus noted how useful optical character recognition is for digitizing old documents at the library. Some attendees even expressed openness to AI in medical research.

Instead, the anti-AI sentiment reflects something more profound: a growing public desire for autonomy and choice in how we interact with technology.

“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 observed. “The awareness has been growing for a long time that these products and these companies that make them have an outsized influence over us, and that we’re not really using these products in the way that we would like to.”

Reclaiming Digital Literacy

For Bailey, the workshops represent a natural extension of librarians’ core mission: advancing digital literacy and helping people reclaim autonomy over their technology choices.

“It’s important, especially when it can be so difficult not to use them, and when the design seems to force adoption,” he explained.

The response from fellow librarians has been unprecedented. Dozens from around the world contacted Cyrus after she published a journal article about her workshop something she says has never happened with her previous work.

“As an information professional, it feels good to see people skeptical of AI,” Bailey said. “It felt really good to see how many people share this feeling.”

What This Movement Reveals

The viral popularity of these workshops exposes a growing tension in our relationship with technology. For years, we’ve accepted “updates” and “improvements” to our devices, rarely questioning whether we wanted them. But AI has crossed a threshold t’s not just changing how we do things, but trying to think and write for us, whether we asked for it or not.

These librarians and their patrons aren’t anti-technology. They’re pro-choice. They want the option to use technology on their own terms, not because it was forced upon them by default settings and opt-out schemes.

The “Avoiding AI” movement may not be about stopping the AI train altogether. But it’s creating space for people to step off the train, even if just for a moment, and ask: “Do I actually want to be on this ride?”

And in a world where tech companies rarely ask that question, sometimes the most powerful thing is having a librarian show you how to say “no.”

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