It’s built into your phone. Into your email. Into your search engine. Artificial intelligence is everywhere—to the point that avoiding it seems nigh on impossible. But there are ways to disable or ignore AI features, and librarians around the world are teaching their tech-averse patrons the ropes.
“Avoiding AI” workshops are springing up at libraries, where patrons who may not be familiar with the technology can hear the pros and cons of its use, as well as get step-by-step instructions on how to disable default AI features on some of the most popular platforms and devices.
Setting a trend
The workshops take inspiration from a journal article by Hannah Cyrus, a librarian at the Bangor Public Library in Maine. Cyrus’s article lays out strategies for other librarians to help patrons “understand and fight back against exploitation by digital technologies,” per its abstract.
“More and more, I was getting questions about, ‘How do I turn this [AI] 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?’” Cyrus told TechCrunch, explaining the motivation for her article. “I just decided that with so much media hype out there about AI products, it would be a good opportunity to teach people about the basics of what is happening when you’re using this technology, and then getting into how to turn it off if you don’t want to use it.”
Cyrus’s first crack at an “Avoiding AI” workshop was a runaway success. While her other classes typically attract around a dozen attendees, she had to cap her first “Avoiding AI” workshop at 30 attendees and open a waitlist. She also livestreamed the event on Zoom, where another 40 participants watched along. Her second workshop had similar attendance.
Following her article’s publication, Cyrus said dozens of librarians across the globe reached out to her for help in developing their own workshops.
“This has never happened before with anything I’ve worked on,” she said. “Nobody has ever been emailing me like, ‘Can you give me your Intro to Computers slides?’”
A workshop in action
One librarian who followed Cyrus’s lead is Charlie Bailey, who works at the South Philadelphia Library in Pennsylvania. The library’s Instagram post advertising its own “Avoiding AI” workshop far surpassed the account’s usual metrics, garnering more than 2,000 likes. (The library’s other posts rarely exceed two dozen likes.) Like Cyrus, Bailey added a second program to account for the demand.
“As a librarian, I think it’s important to see this as advancing digital literacy and helping people reclaim their autonomy over whether they want to use AI tools,” Bailey said. “It’s important, especially when it can be so difficult not to use them, and when the design seems to force adoption.”
View this post on Instagram
At Bailey’s workshop, attendees commiserated over their AI-based frustrations. “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,” one workshop attendee said (a reality becoming increasingly common and increasingly disruptive of communities across America).
“I keep getting AI shoved down my throat at work, and every time I see it, I think about the environment,” shared another attendee. Gallup polling shows that 70% of Americans are worried about the environmental impact of AI data centers, including 46% who “worry a great deal.”
Cyrus believes that forced AI features “might be the straw that’s breaking the camel’s back” when it comes to AI fatigue. “The awareness has been growing for a long time that these products and these companies that make them have an outsized influence over us, and that we’re not really using these products in the way that we would like to,” she said.
