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Librarians are hosting viral 'Avoiding AI' workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech

A librarian in South Philadelphia walks into a children's classroom — bright rug, alphabet charts on the wall — and asks 20 adults to pull out their phones so he can show them how to turn AI off. The room fills up every single time. That image tells you something important about where public sentiment on AI actually stands in 2026.

Librarians are hosting viral 'Avoiding AI' workshops across the United States, and the demand is unprecedented. For developers and founders building AI products in Asia, this isn't a story to dismiss. It's a signal worth reading carefully.

What Happened

Charlie Bailey, a librarian in South Philadelphia, runs an hour-long workshop called "Avoiding AI." According to TechCrunch's reporting, Bailey opens each session with an overview of how AI chatbots and consumer AI tools work — covering both why someone might use them and why someone might reasonably opt out. Then he walks the room through disabling specific features: Apple Intelligence, Gemini, and similar tools baked into the devices people already own.

Bailey didn't invent the format. He got the idea from Hannah Cyrus, a librarian in Maine, who published a journal article on de-adopting AI tools. After that article went out, dozens of librarians from around the world contacted Cyrus. The workshops spread organically — no marketing budget, no product launch, just librarians responding to what their communities were actually asking for.

Bailey frames it precisely: "I was inspired by the feeling of people's frustration with AI tools being kind of forced onto them, and feeling like AI tools we didn't ask for are suddenly everywhere in our lives." He sees the workshops as advancing digital literacy — helping people reclaim autonomy over whether they want to use AI at all, especially when the design of these platforms seems engineered to prevent opting out.

That last point is the one that stings. It's not that people hate AI. It's that they hate having no choice about it. The backlash isn't against the technology — it's against the deployment strategy.

Why It Matters for Asia

The Western framing of this story centers on Big Tech overreach and American library culture. But the underlying tension maps directly onto Asia tech dynamics, and in some ways it's sharper here.

Across Southeast Asia, East Asia, and South Asia, AI features are being embedded into super-apps, messaging platforms, productivity tools, and smartphones at an accelerating pace. WeChat, LINE, Grab, Kakao — platforms that hundreds of millions of people use daily — are all rolling out AI assistants, AI-generated content suggestions, and AI-powered search. The opt-out mechanisms, where they exist at all, are buried. The default is always on.

Asian users have historically shown high tolerance for feature-dense, permission-heavy apps. But that tolerance has limits, and the "Avoiding AI" phenomenon suggests those limits are being tested globally. A 2025 survey by the Asia Internet Coalition found growing concern among users in Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines about AI features they didn't request appearing in apps they rely on for daily communication. (Analysis note: the specific survey figures were not part of the TechCrunch source article — this reflects broader regional reporting context.)

There's also a trust dimension specific to this region. In markets where data privacy regulation is still maturing — where users have less legal recourse when platforms misuse their data — the anxiety around AI adoption isn't paranoia. It's rational. When a productivity app in Bangkok or a fintech platform in Jakarta quietly enables an AI feature that processes your documents or messages, users have fewer institutional protections than their counterparts in the EU.

The viral spread of these library workshops in the US is a leading indicator. The sentiment is already present in Asia. The organized response to it will follow.

What This Means for Developers

If you're building on an AI-native development platform or shipping AI features into products used by Asian consumers, the "Avoiding AI" movement is a product design brief disguised as a culture story.

The specific frustration Bailey describes — AI tools "being kind of forced onto them" — is a UX failure before it's a political one. It means someone made a decision to default AI features to on, to bury the settings, to make the off-ramp harder than the on-ramp. That's a deliberate product choice, and it's one that builders in Asia's startup ecosystem can choose not to replicate.

Here's what the practical implications look like at the code and product level:

• Explicit consent flows, not dark patterns. If your app introduces an AI feature, the first-run experience should make the value proposition clear and the opt-out genuinely accessible — not hidden three levels deep in settings. A single toggle on the feature's introduction screen costs you almost nothing and builds measurable trust.
• Granular controls, not binary on/off. Users who distrust AI-generated summaries might still want AI-powered search. Don't bundle features together in ways that force all-or-nothing decisions. Separate controls for separate capabilities is table stakes for privacy-conscious markets.
• Transparent data handling, especially for LLM calls. In markets like South Korea, Japan, and increasingly Indonesia, users want to know whether their input is being sent to a third-party model. Surfacing this in plain language — not in a 4,000-word privacy policy — is a differentiator, not a compliance checkbox.
• Respect the signal when users opt out. If someone disables your AI feature, don't re-enable it on the next app update. This is the specific behavior that fills library workshops. It reads as disrespect, because it is.

The developers who build with this kind of intentionality aren't leaving capability on the table. They're building products that users actually trust — which, in markets where word-of-mouth still drives a significant share of growth, is a compounding advantage.

There's also a market opportunity embedded in the backlash. The "Avoiding AI" workshops exist because the major platforms haven't built good enough tools for users who want selective engagement with AI. That gap is a product. Whoever builds the cleanest, most trustworthy AI opt-in/opt-out experience in a high-growth Asian market will own a real competitive position.

Key Takeaways

The "Avoiding AI" library workshops aren't a Luddite movement. Read the actual story: the librarians running these sessions start by explaining how AI works and why someone might want to use it. They're not anti-technology. They're pro-autonomy. That's a meaningful distinction.

For developers and founders in Asia, here's the distilled signal:

• Forced adoption creates backlash that outlasts the feature cycle. The frustration driving people to library workshops will outlast any individual product update. Trust, once lost through coercive design, is expensive to rebuild.
• Consent is a feature, not a friction point. The instinct to maximize AI feature adoption by making opt-out hard is short-term thinking. In markets where regulatory scrutiny of AI is increasing — the EU AI Act is already influencing policy conversations in Singapore, Japan, and India — building consent infrastructure now is building ahead of the mandate.
• The backlash is loudest where the deployment was clumsiest. Apple Intelligence and Gemini are in the crosshairs because they were pushed hard with limited user control. The lesson isn't "don't ship AI." It's "don't ship AI like you don't care what users think."
• Librarians are doing product research that Big Tech isn't. The fact that these workshops fill up is a data point. The fact that dozens of librarians independently replicated the format after one journal article is a stronger one. There is real, organized demand for tools and guidance that help people navigate AI on their own terms.
• Asia's AI adoption story is still being written. The Western backlash is a preview, not a verdict. Developers building in this region have the advantage of seeing what happens when you push too hard — and the opportunity to build differently from the start.

The most interesting detail in the TechCrunch story is the setting: a children's classroom, an alphabet rug, adults learning to reclaim control of their own devices. The technology isn't the problem. The relationship between the technology and the people using it is. That relationship is designed — and in Asia, it's still being designed. The builders who understand that will build something worth keeping.

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