Avoiding AI workshops are turning public libraries into opt-out clinics for a public that didn’t consent to having AI packed into phones, search, email, and workplace software. That is the sharper signal beneath the viral library classes: Silicon Valley is selling AI as inevitable, while some users are asking librarians how to make it disappear.
At a South Philadelphia library, librarian Charlie Bailey led about 20-odd adults through steps to disable Apple Intelligence and Gemini, according to TechCrunch. The class was called Avoiding AI, and the demand was strong enough that Bailey scheduled a second session after too many people registered for the first.
“I was inspired by the feeling of people’s frustration with AI tools being kind of forced onto them, and feeling like AI tools we didn’t ask for are suddenly everywhere in our lives,” Bailey told TechCrunch.
XOOMAR analysis: These sessions don’t read like nostalgia or blanket technophobia. They look more like consumer resistance to default settings, opaque automation, data extraction, and the feeling that Big Tech has changed the terms of ordinary computing without asking.
The anti-AI backlash has found its classroom: the public library
The public library is an awkward place for the AI industry to meet its critics, which is exactly why the signal matters. Libraries are not anti-technology spaces. They have spent decades helping people use computers, search the web, set up email, scan documents, apply for services, and avoid bad information online.
That makes Avoiding AI workshops harder to dismiss as a fringe backlash. Bailey starts his hour-long session with a plain-language overview of how AI chatbots and consumer AI tools work, including why people might use them and why others might abstain. Then he walks through major platforms and devices, showing step-by-step instructions on a projector for turning off specific features.
“As a librarian, I think it’s important to see this as advancing digital literacy and helping people reclaim their autonomy over 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 force adoption.”
That word, autonomy, is doing most of the work. The fight is not about whether AI exists. It is about whether users can see it, understand it, refuse it, and still use basic digital services without being dragged into every new automated feature.
The strongest counterpoint is obvious: many people do want AI in their phones, documents, search results, and inboxes. Bailey’s own class includes an explanation of why people might choose to use these tools. But the packed room suggests a second market exists, one organized around refusal rather than adoption.
Inside the viral Avoiding AI workshops and the questions people bring
The classes are practical first. Attendees learn how AI tools show up in consumer products, where opt-outs exist, and where they don’t. In Bailey’s workshop, that meant disabling Apple Intelligence and Gemini. In Maine, librarians have helped patrons turn off AI-powered assistants such as Siri, disable smart email features, and shift away from services that don’t offer the search experience patrons want.
At the South Philadelphia session, the room also became a live tips exchange. One attendee explained that appending “&udm=14” to a Google Search hides AI results. Bailey wrote the string on a whiteboard next to the teen Wi-Fi login credentials. That detail captures the mood: people are not waiting for product roadmaps or corporate statements. They are sharing workarounds.
The anxieties are concrete. One attendee named Johnny raised the possibility of a data center being built near a home. Another, Gabrielle, said AI was being pushed at work and that “every time I see it, I think about the environment.” She also drew a line that matters: she was “not against AI in terms of medical breakthroughs.”
That distinction runs through the reporting. Hannah Cyrus, a librarian at Bangor Public Library, told TechCrunch that the movement is not about rejecting all technology. She pointed to optical character recognition as useful for scanning old documents at the library. The target is forced consumer AI, not every automated system.
XOOMAR analysis: This is why libraries are credible hosts. They are local, free, noncommercial, and used to helping people who feel shut out by fast-moving tools. A vendor can teach adoption. A library can teach choice.
The attendance numbers show a mismatch between AI rollout and user comfort
The library-level numbers are small compared with Big Tech’s AI ambitions, but they are unusually intense for local digital literacy programming.
| Signal | Reported detail | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Bangor attendance | Cyrus’ regular classes like Intro to Computers get about a dozen attendees | Avoiding AI drew far above her normal tech-class baseline |
| First Bangor workshop | Registration was cut off at 30 people, with a waitlist and Zoom option | Demand exceeded room capacity |
| Bangor livestream total | About 70 people attended each of Cyrus’ first two workshops including livestream | The topic moved beyond a standard local class |
| Philadelphia social reach | Bailey’s library Instagram post got over 2,000 likes and 220 shares | Most library posts get no more than a few dozen likes |
| Maine librarian training | 20 Maine librarians enrolled in Cyrus’ spring class, according to Bangor Daily News reporting supplied in the source material | The model is spreading through library networks |
Cyrus told TechCrunch that after publishing a journal article about her workshop, dozens of librarians from around the world contacted her.
“This has never happened before with anything I’ve worked on,” Cyrus told TechCrunch. “Nobody has ever been emailing me like, ‘Can you give me your Intro to Computers slides?’”
The Bangor Daily News material adds another date marker: Cyrus first taught the class in fall of 2025, when more than 70 people enrolled. She taught it again in the spring, and Steven Brown of Searsmont Town Library was among 20 Maine librarians to enroll.
The numbers do not prove a mass anti-AI revolt. They do prove that opt-out education has become unusually magnetic for a topic that, on paper, sounds dry: settings, defaults, privacy, search, assistants. That is the mismatch. Corporate AI deployment often arrives as a product update. User discomfort arrives later, at the reference desk.
What the figures can’t fully capture is irritation. AI summaries in search, writing prompts in email, assistants on phones, and automated features inside workplace tools can feel minor in isolation. Together, they create a sense that software is no longer waiting for instruction. It is interrupting.
Librarians, tech companies, workers, and students are not arguing about the same thing
Librarians in the source material frame the issue as information literacy. Cyrus said patrons came to her with questions such as: “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?”
Her answer was not just a settings clinic. It was a class on what happens when people use the technology, followed by how to turn it off if they don’t want it.
In the Bangor Daily News material, Cyrus is more blunt about the information problem:
“Generative AI doesn’t generate information,” Cyrus said. “It generates words.”
That sentence explains why librarians are stepping in. AI summaries can pull from sources that vary in quality, and Cyrus warned that linked articles do not always correspond to what a summary says. For an information professional, that is not a niche complaint. It strikes at the basic chain between source, claim, and reader.
Big Tech sees this differently. XOOMAR analysis: For platform companies, AI features are usually packaged as productivity upgrades and product differentiation. In that frame, opt-out demand looks like friction to be reduced. For librarians, friction can be the point. It gives patrons time to ask what data is being collected, what is being summarized, what is being automated, and who benefits.
Workers enter from another angle. Gabrielle’s comment about AI being pushed at work fits the broader library discussion in the supplied Civics of Technology material, which describes concerns that GenAI can disrupt workloads, contract negotiations, reference support, instruction services, and workplace morale. The provided material also cites an Upwork report finding that GenAI integration increased workloads, though no further figures were supplied.
Students and campuses appear in that same material as part of a wider institutional fight over artificial systems, especially around instruction, publishing, vendor contracts, and disclosure. The supplied sources do not support broad claims about student cheating accusations or job application screening in these workshops, so those should stay outside the frame here. The supported point is narrower and stronger: librarians are being asked to mediate systems that arrive before communities have agreed on norms.
The civil liberties layer is also growing. Niche Academy’s listing for Cyrus’ “Refusal as Instruction: Breaking Up with Big Tech” webinar says major technology corporations such as Google, Amazon, and Meta can feel like the only option for patrons and library workers, while their practices can conflict with library values of privacy, intellectual freedom, and the public good. That connects this library-level backlash to broader fights over platform power, including our coverage of Big Tech blocking Digital Services Act data access in an EU test and the Big Tech fight pulling Trump into an EU digital rules clash.
From privacy clinics to AI opt-out lessons, libraries are reprising an old role
The strongest reason this story matters is that libraries have seen this pattern before. They are often where abstract tech policy becomes a person with a phone, a password problem, a confusing app, or a question about whether a source can be trusted.
Cyrus already teaches technology classes. Her usual Intro to Computers sessions get about a dozen attendees. Brown, the Searsmont library director, described helping patrons with information technology as a normal part of being a librarian. He said AI removal services are an extension of telling people they have choices.
“A lot of times, it’s just telling people that they have choices,” Brown said. “Their phone came a certain way, but they don’t have to use it the way that it came.”
That is a useful distillation of the moment. Earlier digital literacy often taught people how to get online, search better, use devices, and protect themselves from scams or misinformation. The AI version is more defensive. People are not only asking how to use a new tool. They are asking how to live around it.
There is a real counterpoint here. AI avoidance can become technically difficult or partial. Some tools can be disabled. Others can only be hidden, reduced, or routed around. Some AI systems sit behind the interface, inside search ranking, spam filters, customer service systems, document tools, or vendor platforms.
That limitation does not weaken the library role. It strengthens it. If total avoidance is unrealistic, then practical literacy becomes more valuable: knowing where AI appears, what choices exist, and when a product offers no meaningful refusal at all.
For consumers and the tech industry, AI avoidance is becoming a market signal
For readers, the practical lesson is not that AI can be cleanly removed from digital life. The source material does not support that. The better lesson is that exposure can be reduced, settings can be changed, alternatives can be considered, and institutions can be pressed for clearer choices.
Practical moves supported by the reporting include:
- Device settings: Turn off AI-powered assistants or smart features where the platform allows it.
- Search behavior: Learn how AI results appear and where workarounds or alternative tools exist.
- Email controls: Disable writing or summary features if they create more irritation than value.
- Data awareness: Treat chatbot interactions as information handed to a company, not as a private conversation.
- Institutional pressure: Ask schools, workplaces, and libraries what AI tools are being used and whether users can opt out.
For the tech industry, Avoiding AI workshops are a warning label. A feature can be technically impressive and still damage trust if it arrives as a default that users don’t understand or can’t decline. The backlash does not need to stop AI adoption to change its economics. It only has to make forced adoption costly in support requests, churn, policy pressure, public criticism, or demand for non-AI alternatives.
Cyrus’ comments sharpen the business risk. She told Bangor Daily News that tools like Gmail and Chat GPT are not neutral because they are products from giant corporations that want information and attention. She also warned that people may share highly personal information with platforms that feel conversational.
“There’s this sort of anthropomorphizing illusion that you’re talking to a person but really you’re feeding information to a corporation and you don’t know where that information is going to surface again,” she said. “These applications are voracious for more and more data.”
XOOMAR analysis: Privacy-first and opt-in products have an opening if they can make refusal simple. The split to watch is not “AI versus no AI.” It is mandatory AI versus visible, limited, user-controlled AI.
AI avoidance could grow into a consumer rights fight over defaults
The next stage of the backlash will likely move beyond library classrooms if the same pattern keeps repeating: users discover an AI feature, dislike the default, struggle to disable it, and turn to a trusted intermediary for help.
Evidence that would confirm the thesis is specific and measurable: more libraries copying Cyrus’ workshop materials, more waitlists, more webinars like “Refusal as Instruction: Breaking Up with Big Tech,” more institutions reviewing AI vendor terms, and more products advertising minimal automation or clearer opt-outs. Evidence that would weaken it would look different: falling attendance, fewer repeat sessions, or users choosing AI features once they understand the tradeoffs.
The political fight will not be over whether AI exists. That question is already stale. The fight will be over defaults, disclosures, data use, automated decisions, and whether refusal remains possible inside tools people need for work, school, government services, and daily communication.
For now, the most revealing AI classroom is not inside a corporate demo room. It is a children’s library space where adults pull out their phones, look at the settings menu, and ask a librarian how to take back control.
What This Means For You
- Public libraries are becoming practical places for people to learn how to opt out of AI tools embedded in everyday devices and software.
- The demand reflects frustration with AI features being added by default to phones, search, email, and workplace tools without clear consent.
- Because libraries are trusted technology educators, these workshops signal mainstream consumer resistance rather than fringe anti-tech sentiment.
Originally published on XOOMAR. For more news and analysis, visit XOOMAR.
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