This Tiny Library's Bye Bye AI Class Went Mega Viral

North Chatham is the kind of place where you drive to the next hamlet over to buy groceries. The hamlet sits in upstate New York, about halfway between Hudson and Albany, and its landmarks are a church, a post office, and a free library serving around eight hundred cardholders, according to The Cool Down. That tiny library just became the most talked about library on the internet.

A flyer for an event called the Bye Bye AI class went viral on Facebook, drawing more than two hundred comments and eight thousand likes. The pitch was simple: bring in your phone or laptop, and the library would help you take the AI features off of it. People from far outside New York piled into the comments. "Do I live anywhere near this library? No. Am I in support of this? Hell yeah!" one commenter wrote, according to The Cool Down.

The poster came from Shea Wert, the library's only full-time librarian. Wert told Business Insider that the idea grew directly out of patron complaints, and she was surprised by how far the reaction traveled. "There's just been enough patrons asking about certain things that bothered them, specifically Gmail auto replies and auto completes really frustrate people," Wert said, according to The Cool Down's report on her interview.

Why people want the AI gone

The Bye Bye AI class is a drop-in session where patrons get help dialing back AI features and sorting out internet privacy concerns. Librarian Hannah Cyrus told Business Insider that older adults make up most of the people asking for tech help, according to The Cool Down, and many of them are annoyed by AI features appearing inside services they already knew how to use.

The frustration is easy to recognize. Nobody asked for autocomplete to finish their sentences or for AI summaries to rearrange their search results. Those features arrived with an update one morning, and the settings to switch them off sit buried several menus deep under labels that change every few months. For plenty of people, especially older users, the sensible move is to ask someone who knows where the switches are. The Bye Bye AI class is exactly that: a place to ask.

The librarian is not anti-AI

The best part of the story is that Wert is no AI hater. She uses AI tools at work herself, for drafting outlines and working through dense policy documents. She also teaches patrons how to get more out of large language models. Earlier this year the library ran an "AI for seniors" session covering the basics of AI and language models. The Bye Bye AI class is not a crusade. It is closer to a service desk for people who want the AI turned off, run by people who also know how to turn it on.

The library already holds weekly tech support drop-in hours, so the class fits right in with what the staff does anyway. It just has a funnier name than most library programming, which is probably why the Bye Bye AI class traveled so far.

Everyone wants their own version

The comments on the viral post read like a wishlist. A reader in central California asked whether North Chatham could publish a digital guide so her own Mariposa County Library could run something similar. Someone in Ohio wanted to know if the session would be streamed or recorded. One commenter near Chatham, in the UK, admitted being confused at first and then thanked Shea anyway, according to the New York Ledger.

It is not hard to see why the idea travels. The same pushback against tech defaults is showing up everywhere: people are digging their old CD players back out because they are tired of streaming platforms deciding what they get to hear, as we covered in the CD revival story. And the AI helpers keep multiplying inside the apps you use all day at work, which carries its own quiet cost.

Strip away the joke name, and the Bye Bye AI class is about something plain: people want a say in what their own devices do. A library with eight hundred cardholders just reminded the internet that the off switch is a feature too. The Cool Down reported on the library's viral flyer, citing the original Business Insider interview with Wert.