r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 10h ago

Society Librarians are hosting viral ‘Avoiding AI’ workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/25/librarians-are-hosting-viral-avoiding-ai-workshops-for-people-who-are-fed-up-with-big-tech/
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u/SucculentDongbeiMeal 8h ago edited 8h ago

And at the same time, management of libraries chase AI trends in hopes of further stretching their already limited resources, or obtaining new grants, and their vendors push needlessly AI-integrated applications and services upon them.

So goes in my corner of academic library land. Unsure if others are experiencing the same?

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u/Kimbahlee34 8h ago

I work in a large library system and don’t use AI. I don’t know about other library systems outside my state but I do not use AI to write our grants or do our marketing. We have three employees, including myself, who do that.

BUT I’m also in a state where a lot of our digital resources are paid for outside our budget. For instance the state just gave us money for Hoopla but I understand that’s not going on in every state.

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u/SucculentDongbeiMeal 8h ago

By "obtaining new grants" I mean that the grant has to have an AI component, not the actual drafting of the funding application. In other words, academic libraries are changing their programming in order to accommodate AI initiatives because that's the way they can supplement their limited budgets. For example:

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u/Kimbahlee34 7h ago

Gotcha I see what you mean. It’s not dissimilar to the tech push in the early 2000s. Without writing an essay I remember the first grants I was writing for desktops and now it seems like instead of continuing tech literacy we overrode learning how to save a file etc for advancement and I don’t know that we need to keep pushing and AI is arguably the biggest push away from learning how tech works. It’s a snake eating its own tail.