Librarians’ ‘Avoiding AI’ Workshops Are Selling Out Across the US

Public librarians in Maine and Philadelphia are running packed, standing-room-only workshops called "Avoiding AI," teaching everyday people how to disable Apple Intelligence, Gemini, and other AI features they never asked for. Hannah Cyrus at Bangor Public Library drew about 70 attendees per session for her first two workshops, compared to a dozen for her usual Intro to Computers class. Charlie Bailey in South Philadelphia saw his library's Instagram announcement pull 2,000 likes and 220 shares, numbers that dwarf the typical few dozen. Dozens of librarians worldwide have since contacted Cyrus to replicate her approach.

What happened

Detail	Fact
Workshop name	Avoiding AI
Creator	Hannah Cyrus, Bangor Public Library, Maine
Typical class attendance	~12 people (Intro to Computers)
Avoiding AI attendance (first two sessions)	~70 each, including Zoom livestream
Philadelphia Instagram post likes	2,000+ likes, 220 shares
Workshop length	~1 hour
Global librarian inquiries to Cyrus	Dozens from around the world

Hannah Cyrus started noticing a pattern at the reference desk. Patrons were not asking how to use AI tools. They were asking how to get rid of them. Questions like “Why is it trying to write my emails for me?” and “Why is it summarizing a one-sentence email I can easily read?” kept coming up. She decided to build a workshop around those concerns.

Cyrus published a journal article describing her workshop design, and the response from other librarians was unlike anything she had experienced. “Nobody has ever been emailing me like, ‘Can you give me your Intro to Computers slides?'” she told TechCrunch. Dozens of librarians from around the world reached out to replicate the format.

Charlie Bailey, a South Philadelphia librarian, took the concept to his community. His hour-long session opens with a plain-language explanation of how AI chatbots and consumer AI tools actually work, covering reasons someone might want to use them and reasons they might not. He then walks through the most popular devices and platforms on a projector, showing attendees exactly how to disable specific features, including Apple Intelligence and Google’s Gemini.

Why is demand so high for AI opt-out workshops?

Attendees at Bailey’s workshop pointed to a few recurring frustrations. One participant named Johnny mentioned the environmental footprint of data centers being built near residential areas. Another, Gabrielle, said she resents AI being pushed on her at work, though she stopped short of rejecting AI entirely, noting she has no objection to its use in medical research. That nuance kept coming up: people are not anti-technology, they are anti-forced-adoption.

One tip that spread around the room: appending &udm=14 to a Google Search URL filters out AI-generated results. Bailey wrote it on the whiteboard alongside the Wi-Fi login for the teen server.

Cyrus put the underlying tension plainly: “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.” She pointed out that awareness of Big Tech’s outsized influence has been building for years, and AI being baked silently into phones and email clients has made it concrete and personal for a lot of people.

Both Cyrus and Bailey are careful to note this is a literacy effort, not a luddite one. Cyrus herself highlighted optical character recognition as a genuinely useful AI application for scanning old library documents. The goal of the workshops is informed choice, not blanket refusal.

Why it matters

For anyone who builds products or runs digital marketing, this trend is a useful signal. When a public library in Maine and another in Philadelphia both sell out workshops about disabling your features, that is direct evidence of friction between product design and user expectations. Forced AI defaults are generating measurable backlash, and that backlash is organized enough to go viral on social media.

Businesses deploying AI tools, whether in internal workflows or customer-facing products, should take note. Transparency about what AI is doing and a clear off-ramp can be the difference between a feature people accept and one that damages trust. This connects directly to how companies approach AI integration in customer-facing contexts: the way a tool is introduced matters as much as what it does.

There is also an SEO and advertising angle here. If a non-trivial share of your audience is actively learning to suppress AI-generated search results (the &udm=14 trick), it may affect how your organic and paid content reaches them. Keeping an eye on shifts in search behavior is worth adding to your regular audit routine.

Our take

Library workshops going viral is a rare thing. The fact that this one did tells you something real: people feel like AI is being done to them, not for them. That is a UX and trust problem, not a technology problem.

From where we sit, the backlash is mostly aimed at default-on features that were never explained. Apple Intelligence and Gemini summaries are not inherently bad, but rolling them out without a clear explanation or an obvious off switch handed skeptics an easy target. If you are advising a client on whether to use AI in their product or communications, the lesson here is simple: ask for permission, be transparent about what the AI is doing, and make the off switch visible. That is not a concession to critics, it is just good design.

The broader picture for our news coverage: this is one of many signals that public trust in AI products is genuinely uneven, and the businesses that acknowledge that will have an easier time than those that assume enthusiasm. If you want to talk through how to introduce AI tools to your customers in a way that builds rather than erodes trust, reach out to the Lumien team.

For context on other AI policy and public reaction stories we have been tracking, see our full AI news coverage.

Source: TechCrunch · AI