It has probably happened to you. You open your email and find that some software has already written a reply for you. Or your phone tries to summarize a message you barely typed.
More and more devices and apps are adding artificial intelligence features without asking first. And a lot of people are tired of it.
Librarians across the country are noticing. In South Philadelphia, librarian Charlie Bailey launched an "Avoiding AI" workshop after repeatedly hearing the same complaints. "I was inspired by the feeling of people's frustration with AI tools being kind of forced onto them," Bailey said. "AI tools we didn't ask for are suddenly everywhere in our lives."
Bailey is not alone. Hannah Cyrus, a librarian in Maine, created the original workshop concept. She says people kept asking her the same questions.
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"More and more, I was getting questions about, 'How do I turn this 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?'"
The sessions are straightforward. The hour-long sessions explain what AI is doing on your gadgets and provide steps to disable it if you prefer.
"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?'" Once her journal article on the workshop was published, dozens of librarians worldwide contacted her.
The interest shows up online, too. Bailey had to schedule a second workshop because the first one filled up so fast. "As an information professional, it feels good to see people skeptical of AI," Bailey said. "It felt really good to see how many people share this feeling."
Attendees have their own reasons for showing up. Johnny, a workshop participant in Philadelphia, worried about bigger consequences. "You have to go through all the trouble to buy a home in today's world," he said, "and two years from now, there could be a data center next to your house." Gabrielle, another attendee, said "I keep getting AI shoved down my throat at work, and every time I see it, I think about the environment." She added that she is "not against AI in terms of medical breakthroughs."
Hannah Cyrus sees a shift happening. "I think the forced adoption of AI on people's devices might be the straw that's breaking the camel's back in some ways," she said. "The awareness has been growing for a long time that these products and these companies that make them have an outsized influence over us."
The bottom line: These workshops are not about being anti-technology. They are about giving people a choice. As Charlie Bailey put it, the goal is to help people "reclaim their autonomy over whether they want to use AI tools." For anyone who has felt annoyed by a robot trying to finish their sentences, that kind of control matters. And with librarians already fielding requests from around the world, the demand is only growing.
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