Librarians are teaching sold-out workshops on how to turn off Apple Intelligence and Gemini

The hottest ticket at the library right now isn’t a book club. It’s a class on how to make your phone dumber.

Charlie Bailey, a librarian in South Philadelphia, recently stood on a children’s alphabet rug and walked 20 adults through the steps of disabling AI features on their devices. His “Avoiding AI” workshop was born from a wave of sheer frustration. “I was inspired by the feeling of people’s frustration with AI tools being kind of forced onto them,” Bailey told TechCrunch. The idea came from Hannah Cyrus, a librarian in Bangor, Maine, who started getting bombarded with practical, fed-up questions from patrons: “Why is it trying to summarize my one-sentence email?”

Cyrus’s first workshop was so popular she had to cap registration at 30 people and open a waitlist; about 70 tuned in via Zoom. When Bailey copied the model in Philly, the library’s Instagram post exploded with over 2,000 likes—a massive spike for an account that usually sees a few dozen. “It felt really good to see how many people share this feeling,” Bailey said. The attendees aren’t Luddites. They swap tips in the comments, like appending “&udm=14” to a Google search URL to hide AI overviews, and voice a mix of environmental and workplace concerns.

This isn’t a blanket rejection of technology. Cyrus points out that optical character recognition is genuinely useful for archival work, and one attendee acknowledged AI’s potential for medical breakthroughs. The real fight is about agency. Cyrus frames the forced integration of AI as the straw breaking the camel’s back, a manifestation of a long-simmering awareness that users don’t really control the products they rely on. “As a librarian, I think it’s important to see this as advancing digital literacy,” Bailey said, framing the pushback as a way to reclaim autonomy.