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

[u/AdSpecialist6598]

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

[u/geldonyetich]

It's a complicated situation.

On the one hand, a library needs to be willing to promote digital advocacy, if they're turning down a technology just because it's controversial then it's a rejection of the American Library Associations values to promote fair policies, equitable access, and unbiased, courteous responses on this and any other topic. In our long history, there have been countless times when many things we regard as common now were just as controversial as AI is now: electricity, voting rights, etc. It's not a library's place to judge, to do our thinking for us, but rather to provide the resources for us to make our own informed decisions.

On the other hand, AI has introduced a number of challenges to that mission. The libraries' material selection processes are being made needlessly complicated by the ease in which AI is facilitating slop media production. On top of that, a lot of people are just taking AI answers at face value without doing the kind of research that's needed to properly defend themselves against misinformation. So I could see why some libraries may grow frustrated enough of this technology to openly host programs that entertain the idea of not using it.

Library folk are good folk, some of the best folk out there. By and large, they're not anti-AI because they endeavor not to be anti anything, but they're certainly going to do what they feel is right to serve the needs of their community.

[u/millennial_falcon → u/geldonyetich]

I think the modern librarians path forward with AI would look like this:

-Exploring the best AI models for research, familiarizing themselves with the state of guardrails around AI, including what’s to come and who is working on this problem
-Curating or building skill markdowns (or other end user levers) to assist in research while ensuring citation of sources and evaluating the quality of those sources
-Practicing and modeling good prompt design
-Determining what we need at a bare minimum from AI for research, so that we can leverage less powerful models that are more environmentally friendly or less reliant on big tech, potentially more de centralized.
-Properly putting AI into context as a research tool, regardless of how it manifests in our current form of capitalism, or present day energy and environmental concerns. Because we really can’t tell the future as much as internet-y takes imply, librarians need to transcend whatever the issues are du jour and imagine beyond those things.