Fed Up with AI? Librarians Are Teaching People How to Turn It Off

Key points

• Librarian Hannah Cyrus held her first "Avoiding AI" workshop at Bangor Public Library in Maine, drawing roughly 70 attendees including a Zoom livestream after in-person registration hit 30 and closed.
• A Philadelphia librarian named Charlie Bailey ran a follow-up workshop; the library's Instagram post announcing it got over 2,000 likes and 220 shares, far above the usual few dozen.
• Cyrus published a journal article about her workshop and was contacted by dozens of librarians from around the world asking to copy the format.
• The workshops teach attendees how to switch off built-in AI features on popular devices and apps, one step at a time.

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, a librarian, 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 assistant suite) and Gemini (Google's AI assistant), and to strip AI features from other popular apps and services.

"I was inspired by the feeling of people's frustration with AI tools being kind of forced onto them," Bailey told TechCrunch AI. "Feeling like AI tools we didn't ask for are suddenly everywhere in our lives."

Why are so many people showing up?

The demand caught everyone off guard. 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 had to close registration at 30, open a waiting list, and stream the class live. About 70 people attended each of her first two workshops.

Cyrus says the questions kept coming from regular library visitors: why is my phone trying to write my emails for me? Why is it summarising a message I can already 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," she said, "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.

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 projected on a screen, covering the most common phones, laptops and platforms.

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 from the page entirely. Bailey wrote it on the whiteboard on the spot.

Not everyone in the room is opposed to AI in every form. One attendee, 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, software that 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 is 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 said. "We're not really using these products in the way that we would like to."

For anyone who wants a starting point before a workshop comes to their local library, the tip shared in Bailey's session is free and works right now: search Google, then add &udm=14 to the web address in your browser bar and press enter.