Librarians are hosting viral ‘Avoiding AI’ workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech

Charlie Bailey stood on a rug meant for kindergartners — the kind with letters spelling out M for moon and Z for zebra — and asked a room full of grown-ups to pull out their phones. He wasn't teaching them to code or troubleshoot Wi-Fi. He was showing them how to shut off Apple Intelligence and Gemini, one setting at a time. About 20 people showed up to his South Philadelphia library for a session called Avoiding AI, and by the end of the hour they'd walked through every major platform, tapping through menus to switch things off.

Bailey didn't invent the format. He borrowed it from Hannah Cyrus, a librarian in Bangor, Maine, who wrote up her own version in a journal article and then found her inbox flooded with librarians from around the world asking for her slides. Cyrus said she started noticing the same complaints over and over at her library's help desk — people confused and annoyed that some assistant was trying to draft their emails or summarize a single sentence they could read themselves in two seconds. So she built a class that explained, in plain terms, what these tools actually do, and then showed people how to opt out if they didn't want them.

The demand caught both librarians off guard. Cyrus's regular Intro to Computers sessions usually pull in about a dozen people. Her first Avoiding AI workshop filled up fast enough that she had to cap registration at 30, start a waitlist, and stream it on Zoom — roughly 70 people ended up attending each of her first two sessions once you count the livestream. Bailey's library posted about its own event on Instagram and watched it pull in over 2,000 likes and 220 shares, numbers that dwarf what the account normally gets. He had to schedule a second workshop just to handle the overflow of sign-ups.

What happens inside these sessions feels less like a tech class and more like a support group. Attendees trade tips — one person mentioned that tacking