North Chatham, a hamlet in upstate New York halfway between Hudson and Albany, doesn’t have much going on. You have to go to the next hamlet over for a store or restaurant. There’s a church, a post office, and a small public library with only about 800 cardholders.
The North Chatham Free Library has gotten a lot of attention lately, however, after a flyer for an upcoming “Bye Bye AI” event offering to remove the AI features from your phone or laptop went viral on Facebook, getting over 200 comments and 8,000 likes.
The poster was made by the library’s sole full-time librarian, Shea Wert. Wert told Business Insider that she had made this event in response to community demand — and was surprised by the reaction from far-flung places.
“Do I live anywhere near this library? No. Am I in support of this? Hell yeah!” wrote one commenter.
“I had to look at the library’s main page to see where Chatham is. I’m in central CA and wonder if we can have a digital guide that our own Mariposa County Library could use for a similar program?” wrote another.
“As someone in Ohio who just happened upon this post; will this be streamed or recorded?” someone else asked.
“As somewhere near Chatham, UK, I was a little confused at first Regardless, thanks Shea!” a jolly Brit wrote.
The library does weekly tech support drop-in hours, and in April it held an “AI for seniors” class that covered the basics of AI and LLMs. But this latest offering was something new. The idea was based on requests Wert had noticed from the community.
“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 during a recent phone call.
“I went to a presentation that another librarian was doing about this topic, and they had had success with it. 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 other librarian, Hannah Cyrus, published a column in a journal of library studies, writing that “libraries have a role to play in facilitating patrons’ rejection of technology, just as much as in their adoption of it.”
Cyrus has offered a series of free classes for patrons, teaching them how to turn off or avoid AI tools on their phones and computers, with great success — and a much larger turnout than other tech classes. TechCrunch reported in July that Cyrus’s article in the library journal inspired other librarians to reach out and ask for help running their own versions of the classes.
“I’ve heard from hundreds of librarians from all over the world asking for my presentation slides,” she told Business Insider.
One of the groups that reached out was a consortium of libraries for the Hudson Valley area, which included the North Chatham Free Library. Cyrus gave a webinar to a group of librarians, including Wert, about how she ran the “Avoiding AI” class.
In Wert’s personal life, she admits to staying a bit of a Luddite, preferring to use a dumbphone. But she’s not adamantly anti-AI and has used AI tools for work to draft outlines or write dense policy text.
“There have been some patrons that I know are using LLMs, and I’m happy to help them with it. I’ve helped them write better prompts, although that is far less common,” she said. “It’s more common that they haven’t used it and they don’t want to use it.”
Both Wert and Cyrus said that most of the people who come in for help with AI or tech in general are older adults, who are often frustrated by new AI features on the services they already use.
The Bye-Bye AI event will take place next week, and Wert isn’t entirely sure what to expect given the viral reaction on Facebook.
“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.”
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