Fed Up with AI? Librarians Are Teaching People How to Turn It Off
Workshops showing ordinary people how to disable AI features on their phones and computers are filling up within hours. Two librarians started it, and dozens more have joined.
Key points
- Librarian Hannah Cyrus held her first "Avoiding AI" workshop at Bangor Public Library in Maine, closing in-person registration at 30 before streaming live to roughly 70 total attendees.
- A Philadelphia librarian named Charlie Bailey ran a follow-up workshop; the library's Instagram post got over 2,000 likes and 220 shares, against a usual few dozen.
- After Cyrus published a journal article on her workshop, dozens of librarians worldwide contacted her asking to copy the format.
- The workshops walk attendees step by step through switching off built-in AI features on popular devices and apps.
Charlie Bailey stood at the front of a children's library room in South Philadelphia, colourful alphabet rug underfoot, and asked twenty adults to pull out their phones. The goal was not to learn. It was to switch things off.
Bailey runs a workshop called "Avoiding AI." For an hour, he walks attendees through the exact on-screen steps to disable Apple Intelligence (Apple's built-in AI suite) and Gemini (Google's AI assistant), and to strip AI features from other popular apps.
"I was inspired by the feeling of people's frustration with AI tools being kind of forced onto them," Bailey told TechCrunch. "Feeling like AI tools we didn't ask for are suddenly everywhere in our lives."
Why are so many people showing up?
Most library computer classes draw around a dozen people. When Hannah Cyrus, a librarian at the Bangor Public Library in Maine, advertised her first Avoiding AI session, she closed registration at 30, opened a waiting list, and streamed the class live. About 70 people attended each of her first two workshops.
Regular library visitors kept arriving with the same complaints: why is my phone trying to write my emails? Why is it summarising a message I can read in five seconds?
"I just decided that with so much media hype out there about AI products, it would be a good opportunity to teach people about the basics of what is happening," Cyrus told TechCrunch, "and then getting into how to turn it off if you don't want to use it."
After Cyrus published a journal article on her approach, she heard from dozens of librarians worldwide wanting to copy it. "This has never happened before with anything I've worked on," she said. AI2Day first covered the opt-out movement on 25 July 2026, around the same time that Gemini's integration into everyday apps was accelerating.
What do these workshops actually cover?
Each session starts with a plain explanation of how AI chatbots work and why someone might, or might not, want them. Then comes the practical part: step-by-step instructions on a projector screen.
Attendees share tips too. One person in Bailey's Philadelphia session revealed that adding "&udm=14" to the end of a Google Search web address removes AI-generated results entirely. Bailey wrote it on the whiteboard on the spot.
Not everyone in the room opposes AI in every form. One attendee named Gabrielle said she objects to being pushed AI at work and worries about its environmental cost, but added: "I'm not against AI in terms of medical breakthroughs." Cyrus herself notes that AI-powered optical character recognition, which reads and digitises old printed documents, is genuinely useful in library archives.
The frustration driving attendance is more specific than a blanket rejection of technology. It's about control.
"The awareness has been growing for a long time that these products and these companies that make them have an outsized influence over us," Cyrus told TechCrunch. "We're not really using these products in the way that we would like to."
What strikes me most here isn't the backlash itself; audiences have grumbled about tech since the smartphone era. It's the speed. Bailey had to schedule a second Philadelphia session because the first overflowed, and Cyrus went from zero international contacts to dozens inside a single journal-article cycle. Libraries are not normally where consumer movements catch fire. Watch whether any device makers respond with more visible opt-out controls before these workshops scale further.
For anyone who wants a starting point before a workshop reaches their local library, the tip from Bailey's session is free: open a Google search, add &udm=14 to the address bar and press enter.
