Librarians in the United States are drawing unusual crowds to workshops that teach people how to avoid consumer AI, TechCrunch reported on July 25th. In South Philadelphia, librarian Charlie Bailey asks adults to take out their phones so he can walk them through disabling Apple Intelligence and Gemini. The class grew from a workshop designed by Maine librarian Hannah Cyrus, who began receiving questions from patrons asking why AI was writing emails, summarizing messages, and appearing inside devices they had not asked to change. Her usual computer classes drew about a dozen people. Her first Avoiding AI sessions filled registration, opened waitlists, and reached dozens more by livestream.

The avoidance class restores an old public function to the library. It does not treat technology as magic or enemy. It treats it as something a citizen should be able to inspect, refuse, and configure. That gesture is modest until one notices how rarely software now offers refusal in plain language. AI features arrive through operating systems, search boxes, office tools, phones, and workplace accounts as if adoption were the default condition of being modern. The librarian stands beside the projector and translates hidden settings into public knowledge. The people in the room are not rejecting medicine, accessibility, archives, or useful automation. They are asking for the right to decide when a machine enters their sentence, their inbox, their search result, and their pocket.