Here is a sentence nobody had on their 2026 card. The hottest ticket at your local public library is a class about turning things off. Specifically, the AI features that Apple, Google and the rest have been stuffing into your phone, your search bar and your email whether you asked or not.
The trend has a name, ‘Avoiding AI’, and a patient zero. Hannah Cyrus, a librarian at Bangor Public Library in Maine, built a workshop for people who felt cornered by tools they never went looking for. In March 2026 she wrote up her method in the peer-reviewed journal Information Technology and Libraries, under the gloriously blunt title Refusal as Instruction: Equipping Patrons to Resist AI, Data Brokers, Big Tech, and More. Then things got loud.
As TechCrunch reported on 25 July, dozens of librarians from around the world got in touch after the article went round. Cyrus told them her sessions were drawing roughly 70 people apiece across in-person and Zoom, against maybe a dozen for a normal class like Intro to Computers. She has had to cap registration at 30 and run a waitlist. In her words, nothing she had worked on had ever landed like this.
What actually happens in the room
It is not a bonfire of the laptops. The hour starts with a plain-English explainer of what generative AI is (software trained to predict text, images or answers, the thing behind chatbots and those ‘summarise this’ buttons), where you are likely to bump into it, and why a person might reasonably want it or reasonably want it gone. Then comes the useful part. Cyrus puts the big platforms up on the projector one by one and walks the room through the actual settings, the menus and toggles that switch off Apple Intelligence, Google’s Gemini features and the rest.
That is the whole radical proposition. Not that AI is evil, but that you should get to decide, and that finding the off switch should not require a computer-science degree or 40 minutes lost in a settings menu designed to keep you there.
Why it has struck a nerve
The subtext is a class one, and it is not subtle. The features arrive by default, pushed down from companies worth trillions, and the burden of undoing them lands on ordinary people who were never consulted. What Cyrus and her peers have worked out is that ‘how do I make this stop’ is now a genuine literacy need, the same way ‘how do I set up email’ was 20 years ago. Framing it as digital literacy rather than technophobia matters, because it treats the patron as an adult making a choice rather than a laggard who needs converting.
The profession is catching up fast. The American Library Association’s June 2026 guidance recommends that libraries offer opt-out options for any AI-enabled service they run, which is a genuinely remarkable thing for a mainstream institution to put in writing. Local coverage in the Bangor Daily News found the same appetite on the ground in Maine well before the national press arrived.
There is something very funny, and a little bit heartening, about the fact that the most effective pushback against the AI rollout is not a lawsuit or a Senate hearing. It is a librarian with a projector and a printout, teaching a full room where the button is.
Did you know: the journal that started it all, Information Technology and Libraries, is open access, so the exact workshop blueprint is free to read and free to copy, which is presumably how it spread to dozens of libraries in the first place.