In a South Philadelphia library classroom decorated for children — alphabet rug and all — about twenty adults recently pulled out their phones for an unusual lesson: how to turn Apple Intelligence and Gemini off. The workshop is called “Avoiding AI,” and according to TechCrunch’s July 25 report, it is part of a small but fast-spreading movement in public libraries built around a demand tech companies rarely design for: opting out.
From one journal article to a movement
The format started with Hannah Cyrus, a librarian at the Bangor Public Library in Maine. Patrons kept bringing her the same complaints — “How do I turn this 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?” — so she built an hour of instruction around the answers, pairing a plain-English explanation of how consumer AI tools work with step-by-step opt-out walkthroughs.
The response broke her usual numbers. Cyrus told TechCrunch her typical tech classes draw about a dozen people; the first Avoiding AI session forced her to cap registration at 30, open a waitlist, and add a Zoom stream. Counting the livestream, roughly 70 people attended each of her first two workshops. After she published a journal article describing the workshop, dozens of librarians from around the world wrote to ask for her materials — “This has never happened before with anything I’ve worked on,” she said.
Charlie Bailey, the South Philadelphia librarian, was one of them. When his branch announced its own session, the library’s Instagram post drew more than 2,000 likes and 220 shares — against the few dozen likes a typical post gets — and registrations overflowed enough that he scheduled a second program.
What actually happens in the room
Bailey’s hour follows Cyrus’s arc: first an overview of how chatbots and consumer AI features work, why someone might want them, and why they might not — then a projector walk-through of the most popular platforms and devices, disabling specific features one by one. Apple ships its own documentation for managing Apple Intelligence features, but the workshops exist precisely because most patrons never find those settings on their own.
The sessions have the texture of a swap meet as much as a class. At Bailey’s workshop, one attendee shared that appending &udm=14 to a Google Search URL hides AI-generated results — a trick Bailey wrote on the whiteboard next to the teen Wi-Fi password. Attendees’ complaints ranged from data centers (“You have to go through all the trouble to buy a home in today’s world, and two years from now, there could be a data center next to your house,” said one, named Johnny) to workplace fatigue and environmental cost.
Backlash, but a discriminating one
What makes this story more interesting than a simple anti-tech revolt is how carefully bounded the objections are. Gabrielle, an attendee who said AI is “shoved down my throat at work,” added that she isn’t against the technology in medical research. Cyrus herself praised optical character recognition for digitizing old library documents. The through-line isn’t rejection of AI — it’s rejection of default-on AI.
“I was inspired by the feeling of people’s frustration with AI tools being kind of forced onto them,” Bailey told TechCrunch, framing the workshops as digital literacy: “helping people reclaim their autonomy over whether they want to use AI tools… especially when the design seems to force adoption.”
Cyrus put the sharpest point on it: “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.”
Why this matters beyond the library
For platform companies, packed opt-out classes at public libraries are a genuinely uncomfortable signal. Every major consumer platform has spent the past two years wiring AI summaries, suggested replies, and assistant overlays into defaults, and the standing assumption has been that resistance is a niche, terminally online phenomenon. A waitlisted workshop in Bangor, Maine — taught by a librarian, attended by ordinary patrons, and replicated across dozens of libraries by request — suggests otherwise.
Libraries have historically been where mainstream discomfort with technology gets institutionalized into curriculum: intro-to-computers classes in the ’90s, internet-safety courses in the 2000s, misinformation literacy in the 2010s. If “how to turn the AI off” is joining that lineage, the demand for user control has moved well past the early adopters — and it’s now being taught, one alphabet-rug classroom at a time.
