Librarians Lead the 'Avoid AI' Movement

When the Library Becomes a Refuge from AI

In a small room at a South Philadelphia library, a librarian stands before twenty adults who have been asked to take out their phones — not to browse the internet, but to learn how to disable the AI features built into their devices. The irony is striking: the room was originally designed for children, yet the attendees have come seeking something far removed from the alphabet — they are searching for freedom from a technology they never asked for.

Where Did the Idea Come From?

The credit for launching these workshops goes to Hannah Sairous, a librarian in Maine, who noticed a marked increase in visitor questions along the lines of: "How do I turn this off? Why is AI trying to write my messages?" She decided to turn these recurring questions into a structured educational program, publishing an academic article about it that attracted the attention of dozens of librarians around the world — something that had never happened to her with any previous work.

The turnout for her first workshop was exceptional; she was forced to close registration at thirty participants, open a waitlist, and stream the event online — bringing the total attendance to around seventy people at each of the first two sessions, compared to the twelve people who typically attend her regular technology classes.

What Do Participants Learn?

The workshop, which runs for approximately one hour, covers three main topics:

• Understanding the Basics: How AI models and chatbots work, and what happens behind the scenes when someone uses these tools.
• Evaluating Options: An objective look at situations where using AI might be beneficial, and those where opting out may be preferable.
• Reclaiming Control: Practical, step-by-step instructions for disabling AI features on major devices and platforms, from Apple Intelligence to Gemini and beyond.

The atmosphere inside these workshops is notably communal; attendees exchange tips from their own discoveries, such as adding &udm=14 to Google search links to remove AI-generated results.

Not a Rejection of Technology, but a Demand for Choice

It is tempting to reduce this movement to an "anti-technology" stance, but the reality is more nuanced. Sairous herself praises optical character recognition tools for digitizing historical documents, and some participants welcome AI applications in fields such as medicine and scientific research. What they reject is the logic of forced adoption: suddenly finding your email being automatically summarized, or an app composing messages on your behalf without you ever asking it to.

One attendee expresses concern about a future in which you might find yourself living next to massive data centers without having chosen that outcome. Another points to the overlap between professional pressure to adopt AI and the environmental questions surrounding its enormous energy consumption.

The Library's Role in a Fast-Moving Digital Age

Librarians involved in this initiative believe their core role has not changed: empowering citizens to engage critically with the information and tools around them. What has changed is the nature of the challenge. Where the battle once centered on evaluating sources of information, it now concerns the human right to choose which technologies to use — or to refuse.

The widespread reach of these workshops — with a single promotional Instagram post surpassing two thousand likes at a library whose posts typically attract only a few dozen — reveals the depth of frustration among a broad segment of users who feel that major technology companies are deciding on their behalf how they interact with their devices and their data.

Ultimately, these workshops are not a call to retreat from the digital age, but a demand for a simple principle: that people should have a say in what is installed on their devices, and a voice in what is done with their data.

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