North Chatham, a hamlet in upstate New York halfway between Hudson and Albany, is a quiet sort of place. There is no shop and no restaurant; for those you drive to the next hamlet over. What it has is a church, a post office, and a small public library with about 800 cardholders.

That library, the North Chatham Free Library, has lately drawn attention most institutions ten times its size never get. Its sole full-time librarian, Shea Wert, made a flyer for an event called “Bye Bye AI,” at which she will remove the AI features from your phone or laptop. Posted on Facebook, the flyer pulled in more than 8,000 likes and 200 comments, most of them from people who live nowhere near North Chatham.

Do I live anywhere near this library? No. Am I in support of this? Hell yeah!

There was a man in central California asking for a digital guide so his own county library could run something similar. There was someone in Ohio wanting to know whether the event would be streamed. Someone near Chatham, England, confessed to a moment of confusion before offering thanks. It is not every day that a hamlet without a corner shop starts fielding requests from two continents, Business Insider reported.

Wert did not set out to make a point about the direction of civilisation. She was answering her patrons. The library already runs weekly tech support drop-in hours, and in April it held an “AI for seniors” class explaining the basics of AI and large language models. The new class grew out of complaints she kept hearing at the desk.

“There’s just been enough patrons asking about certain things that bothered them, specifically Gmail auto replies and auto completes really frustrate people,” Wert told Business Insider. The pattern is worth pausing on. Nobody in North Chatham wrote to Google asking for their sentences to be finished by a machine. The feature arrived anyway, and now a librarian in a town of a few hundred people runs a class on how to get rid of it.

Where the idea came from

Wert got the idea from another librarian. “I went to a presentation that another librarian was doing about this topic, and they had had success with it,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Okay, well, I’ve heard enough from my patrons that they’re worried about this stuff or frustrated about this stuff that I might as well try to do one.’”

That librarian is Hannah Cyrus, who works at the public library in Bangor, Maine, according to TechCrunch. Cyrus wrote up her own “Avoiding AI” classes in a journal of library studies, arguing that “libraries have a role to play in facilitating patrons’ rejection of technology, just as much as in their adoption of it.” Her free sessions, teaching patrons to switch off or dodge AI tools on their phones and computers, drew far bigger crowds than her other tech classes. TechCrunch reported in July that her article set off a chain of librarians asking how to copy it.

“I’ve heard from hundreds of librarians from all over the world asking for my presentation slides,” Cyrus told Business Insider. Among those who reached out was a consortium of libraries in the Hudson Valley, which includes North Chatham. Cyrus ran a webinar for the group, Wert among them, on how she taught the class. That is how an experiment in Maine reached a hamlet in Columbia County.

No crusade

Neither woman casts herself as an enemy of the technology wholesale, and the plain facts do not let them. Wert keeps a dumbphone in her own pocket and calls herself something of a Luddite, yet she has used AI tools at work to draft outlines and grind out dense policy text. “There have been some patrons that I know are using LLMs, and I’m happy to help them with it,” she said. “I’ve helped them write better prompts, although that is far less common. It’s more common that they haven’t used it and they don’t want to use it.”

That last sentence carries the story. Both Wert and Cyrus say the people who come in for help are mostly older adults, worn down by new AI features bolted onto services they had already learned to use. The grievance is not with the machine as such but with the fact that nobody was asked. Consent, in the design of these products, runs in one direction.

The Bye Bye AI event takes place next week, and Wert is not sure what the viral fame will do to attendance. The class is a drop-in affair, and she is one librarian with two hands. “I’m a little concerned based on setting it up as a drop-in thing that there’ll be people waiting because I can only help so many at one time,” she said. “But I don’t know. If 20 people come, that would feel like a lot to me.”

Twenty people in a reading room in North Chatham, each waiting to have a feature removed that the richest companies on earth spent billions to put there. The companies will not notice. The librarian will be busy all afternoon.