The hottest tech class in America right now isn't about learning to use AI. It's about making it go away.
At the Bangor Public Library in Maine, librarian Hannah Cyrus kept fielding the same question from patrons: how do I turn off these AI features I never asked for? The summaries in search. The assistant in the photos app. The button that rewrites your texts. So she built a workshop called "Avoiding AI" — a patient, step-by-step walkthrough of disabling Apple Intelligence, Google Gemini, AI search summaries, and the rest.
Then it went viral.
Waitlists at the library
Cyrus capped registration at 30 people. Then came the waitlist. Then a Zoom stream for the overflow. Sessions now draw around 70 participants each — for a class about settings menus. After she published a journal article describing the workshop, dozens of librarians from around the world contacted her about running their own versions.
Librarians report that demand for AI opt-out classes is outpacing their traditional tech programming by a wide margin. Think about what that means: the same institutions that spent two decades teaching people how to get online are now packing rooms teaching people how to get something off.
Why people are showing up
The workshops aren't anti-technology rallies. What's driving attendance, by the librarians' account, is the forced part of forced adoption — AI features arriving via automatic update, switched on by default, with the off switch buried three menus deep and moved every quarter.
That experience produces a specific kind of frustration. It's not "I hate AI." It's "I wasn't asked." People who feel fine about chatbots in general still bristle at summaries appearing over their search results uninvited.
The sessions also spend time explaining how the AI tools actually work and why some people choose to sit them out — treating opting out as a legitimate, informed choice rather than a failure to keep up. That framing might be the real product. Nobody else offers it: not the tech companies, and not most of the coverage.
The trusted middleman returns
There's a reason this is happening at libraries and not in YouTube tutorials. A librarian has no upsell and no engagement metric. When the default settings of a phone reflect a company's interests instead of yours, a neutral human who'll walk you through the menus becomes unexpectedly valuable.
That's the quiet story here: digital self-defense has become a community skill, taught in person, at the one public institution left with no stake in your screen time.
The habit worth copying
You don't need to wait for a local session. The core practice travels well: every time your phone updates, spend ten minutes in settings reviewing what's new and what got switched on without you. Treat defaults as suggestions from someone else — because that's what they are.
Seventy people at a time, in a library in Maine, are relearning a rule the software industry hoped they'd forget: your device's settings are supposed to be yours.
Image: Ринат Мустафин, via Pexels
