Librarians' 'Avoiding AI' workshops go viral, hit waitlists

A librarian in Bangor, Maine started running an hour-long class on how to turn off the AI features Apple and Google keep pushing onto phones, and the sign-up sheet blew past what the room could hold. That is the story TechCrunch reported this week, and it is worth sitting with because consumer AI sentiment is showing up in the least tech-industry venue imaginable.

Hannah Cyrus, the librarian at Bangor Public Library, told TechCrunch her sessions were drawing roughly 70 people apiece across in-person and Zoom, forcing her to cap registration at 30 and start a waitlist. Charlie Bailey, a librarian in South Philadelphia, adapted the format after learning about Cyrus's work. His library's Instagram post about the workshop got over 2,000 likes and 220 shares, on an account whose posts usually do not clear a few dozen likes. Cyrus's read on the moment is that 'the forced adoption of AI on people's devices might be the straw that's breaking the camel's back.'

The framing both librarians use is the part I would not skim past. Bailey calls the sessions digital literacy work, 'helping people reclaim their autonomy over whether they want to use AI tools,' not a repudiation of the tools themselves. That posture lives inside the mission libraries already have, which is why it travels better than a straightforward backlash pitch would.

The honest caveat is that two librarians and one viral Instagram post are not a movement, and the TechCrunch piece does not tell us how many similar workshops are running elsewhere, whether attendees actually kept the features disabled once defaults reasserted themselves, or whether librarians are trading vetted materials or improvising each session. Attendee motivations in the reporting range from environmental concerns to workplace pressure, which is a wide funnel to be reading a single narrative into.

Still, if you ship consumer AI, the signal to notice is where opt-out demand is surfacing. It is not on tech Twitter. It is at the reference desk, framed as literacy, with a waitlist.