Public Libraries Become Unlikely Battlegrounds Against Unwanted AI Creep on Devices
Key takeaways
- Librarians Hannah Cyrus and Charlie Bailey independently developed 'Avoiding AI' workshops that far exceeded typical attendance expectations, with one Philadelphia post earning over 2,000 Instagram likes.
- Attendees are motivated by concerns ranging from environmental impact to workplace pressure, but organizers frame the workshops as pro-digital-literacy rather than anti-technology.
- The grassroots movement highlights a disconnect between how tech companies are rolling out AI features and how everyday users actually want to engage with them.
Something unusual is happening inside public libraries: rooms that typically host quiet readers and children's story hours are filling up with frustrated adults who want to learn how to turn artificial intelligence off. Workshops branded as 'Avoiding AI' are gaining viral traction across the country, drawing attendance figures that leave seasoned librarians genuinely stunned. The sessions cover everything from disabling Apple Intelligence and Google's Gemini to appending custom strings to search queries to hide AI-generated results — and demand is outpacing available seats.
The movement traces back to Hannah Cyrus, a librarian at the Bangor Public Library in Maine, who began fielding a steady stream of patron questions about AI tools appearing uninvited on their devices. '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?' Cyrus recalled hearing from patrons. Sensing that media enthusiasm around AI was drowning out more skeptical voices, she developed a workshop that first explained what these tools actually do under the hood, and then walked attendees through opting out of them. Her typical classes draw around a dozen people. The first Avoiding AI session attracted so much interest that registration was capped at 30, a waitlist was opened, and a Zoom livestream brought total attendance to roughly 70 participants per session.
Cyrus published a journal article detailing her workshop methodology, and the response from fellow library professionals was unlike anything she had experienced in her career. Dozens of librarians from around the world reached out requesting her materials — a level of peer engagement she described as genuinely unprecedented. Among them was Charlie Bailey, a South Philadelphia librarian who took Cyrus' framework and brought it to his own community with equally striking results. A single Instagram post promoting his event earned over 2,000 likes and 220 shares, compared to the handful of interactions the library's social posts typically receive. His first session filled so quickly that a second had to be scheduled.
Inside Bailey's workshop, the energy carries a distinct sense of solidarity among strangers who feel they share a common grievance. Attendees swap their own discovery tips, discuss environmental concerns tied to AI data centers, and openly wrestle with the nuance that rejecting intrusive consumer AI doesn't necessarily mean rejecting the technology in all its forms. Cyrus herself acknowledged that tools like optical character recognition — also powered by AI — serve genuinely valuable purposes in library archiving work. The distinction these librarians are drawing is between AI that serves users on their own terms versus AI that is quietly embedded into products without meaningful consent.
At its core, the 'Avoiding AI' movement is framed by its organizers as an extension of traditional digital literacy work rather than a technophobic backlash. Bailey described it as helping people 'reclaim their autonomy,' while Cyrus suggested that forced AI adoption may represent a tipping point in growing public unease about how much influence large tech companies exert over everyday life. Whether this grassroots momentum translates into broader pressure on platform developers remains to be seen, but the packed library classrooms suggest that the appetite for pushback — and for practical tools to act on it — is far larger than Silicon Valley may have anticipated.
The bigger picture
The viral spread of 'Avoiding AI' workshops exposes a genuine miscalculation on the part of major tech platforms. Companies like Apple and Google have treated AI feature integration as an obvious consumer benefit, rolling out changes through routine software updates with little fanfare and fewer off-ramps. The assumption embedded in that approach — that users will adapt, appreciate, and eventually depend on these tools — is being tested in a very public way. When public libraries, institutions with limited marketing budgets and quiet Instagram accounts, start going viral by teaching people how to disable your flagship features, that is a meaningful signal about sentiment on the ground.
What makes this movement particularly interesting from an industry perspective is who is leading it. Librarians occupy a unique cultural position as trusted, non-commercial information intermediaries. They are not tech journalists with an agenda, not privacy advocates with a funding base, and not politicians grandstanding for votes. They are community professionals responding directly to expressed patron need. That legitimacy gives the 'Avoiding AI' framing a credibility that a think tank report or op-ed column simply cannot replicate. Big Tech's PR apparatus is less equipped to dismiss a librarian in Philadelphia than it is to counter a Silicon Valley critic.
Investors and product teams should pay attention to what these workshops reveal about the gap between adoption metrics and genuine user satisfaction. High engagement numbers for AI features can mask passive acceptance rather than active enthusiasm, especially when opting out requires navigating buried settings menus. The fact that people are traveling to library workshops to learn how to find those menus speaks volumes. Regulators already circling AI disclosure and consent requirements in the EU and increasingly in the US may find this kind of grassroots documentation politically useful. The next question is whether tech companies respond with more transparent opt-in models — or whether they continue banking on friction keeping users inside walled gardens.
We wanted to cover this story because it sits at the intersection of several conversations we think deserve more airtime: the growing public discomfort with passive AI adoption, the often-overlooked role of libraries in shaping tech literacy, and what 'consent' actually means when software updates quietly reshape how your devices behave. At LagPing, we cover AI not just as a product category but as something reshaping daily life in ways people don't always feel they chose. This story is a vivid, human illustration of that tension. We were struck by how something as seemingly modest as a library workshop became genuinely viral — that doesn't happen by accident, and it tells us something real about where public sentiment sits right now. We think our readers, whether they are enthusiastic early adopters or quietly frustrated by another AI feature they didn't ask for, will find something worth thinking about here.
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