“Everybody’s on their phone on my show!” joked Charlie Bailey, a librarian in South Philadelphia. He recently asked his audience to take out their phones to walk them through the steps to disable Apple Intelligence and Gemini.
Bailey stands at the front of a library classroom aimed at children – her focus is the flowery rug she’s standing on, reminding us that M is for “moon” and Z is for “zebra.” But the 20 or so adults in the room aren’t here to learn the alphabet. They are in a workshop called Avoiding AI, this time, this time not representing “apple” and “igloo.”
“I was inspired by people’s sense of frustration when AI tools are forced into them, and I feel like AI tools that we didn’t ask for are just everywhere in our lives,” Bailey told TechCrunch.
Bailey begins the hour-long workshop with an overview of how AI chatbots and other consumer AI tools work, explaining why people might want to use these products, and why they might choose not to. After that, he walks through all the most popular technology platforms and devices, showing step-by-step instructions on the processor to guide people in turning off certain features.
“As a librarian myself, I think it’s important to see this as promoting digital literacy and helping people reclaim their autonomy in whether they want to use AI tools,” Bailey said. “It is important, especially when it would be very difficult not to use them, and when the design seems to force adoption.”
Bailey got the idea for the Avoiding AI workshop from Hannah Cyrus, a librarian in Maine. She was one of many librarians from around the world who contacted Koresi after he published an article about building his own library.
“This has never happened before with anything I’ve ever worked on,” Cyrus told TechCrunch. “No one has ever emailed me like, ‘Can you give me your Introduction to Computers slide?’
At the Bangor Public Library, patrons turn to Cyrus when they need help with anything involving technology.
“I kept getting questions about, ‘How do I answer this?’ [AI] things closed? Why is it trying to write my emails? Why is it trying to summarize my one-sentence email that I can’t easily read?’” Cyrus said: “I just decided that since there’s so much media talk about AI products, it would be a good opportunity to educate people about the basics of what’s going on when you use this technology, and then go into the process of turning it off if you don’t want to use it.”
Typically, Koresi’s classes like Intro to Computers get about a dozen participants. But so many people expressed interest in his first Avoiding AI course that he had to limit registration to 30 people, open a waiting list, and share the workshop on Zoom. Including live streaming, about 70 people attended Cyrus’ first workshop.
When Bailey followed Cyrus’ lead to hold a workshop in Philadelphia, the reception was unprecedented. The library’s Instagram post about the event “Avoiding AI” received more than 2,000 likes and 220 shares, while most of the library’s posts received less than a few likes. He organized a second program because the first one was so well-subscribed.
“As a data scientist, it’s nice to see people questioning AI,” Bailey said. “It made me very happy to see how many people have this feeling.”
There is an atmosphere of camaraderie among a roomful of strangers during the workshop. When Bailey invited attendees to share their tips, one person explained that if you paste “&udm=14” into Google Search, it will hide the AI results. Bailey writes a series of letters on the floor of the whiteboard next to the login information for the youth’s Wi-Fi server.
“You have to go through all the trouble to buy a house in today’s world, and two years from now, there might be a data center next to your house,” said one workshop attendee named Johnny.
“I always put AI down my throat at work, and every time I see it, I think about the environment,” added an attendee named Gabrielle. But he also doesn’t write off AI as a technology entirely. “I’m not against AI in terms of medical advances.”
AI watchers know that this technology is much broader than chat apps and deepfake. Koreshi mentioned how useful the visual character recognition is for scanning old documents in the library. But for him and the people who attend his workshops, the anti-AI movement isn’t about rejecting technology entirely as much as it is about encouraging more control, collaboration, and freedom in how people use technology.
“I think the forced adoption of AI in human machines may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back in some ways,” he said. “There has been awareness for a long time that these products and the companies that make them have a great impact on us, and that we are not using these products as much as we would like.”
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