JESSICA STILLMAN, Inc.; My Tiny Hometown Library Put on a ‘Bye Bye AI’ Event and the Internet Went Nuts: When a tiny small town library tech workshop can go viral, you know the AI backlash is really gathering steam.
"The internet goes wild for ‘Bye Bye AI’
If Chatham is sleepy, the nearby hamlet of North Chatham is downright comatose. It basically consists of a single street lined with tidy homes and a white clapboard church. There is neither a stoplight nor a store. But there is a quaint little public library (also white clapboard) that usually puts on worthy but less-than-headline-catching events like quilt raffles and pottery workshops.
That is until librarian Shea Wert noticed multiple library goers were asking her how to disable all the various new AI features on their devices.
“There’s just been enough patrons asking about certain things that bothered them, specifically Gmail auto replies and auto completes really frustrate people,” Wert explained to Business Insider.
“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 might as well try to do one,’” Wert continued.
So she went ahead and posted a flyer for the upcoming ‘Bye Bye AI’ event on Facebook to alert locals who might be interested in attending. The internet went nuts. The post quickly racked up 8,000 likes...
If North Chatham can go viral we’re in a whole new world
The above is only a small sampling of polls showing that people have an increasingly terrible view of AI. And that’s not even getting into the massive backlash against data center construction. (Which you can read about here, here, and here.) Americans recently told pollsters they’d prefer to live next to a nuclear power plant than one of the massive installations powering AI.
All of this data paints a pretty grim picture of people’s feelings. But for me personally, no number can paint quite such a vivid picture of anti-AI sentiment as the fact it can make even bucolic, boring North Chatham — which I used to speed through driving between my boyfriend’s house and my high school waitressing job — go viral.
As much as I admire heroic keepers of the public sphere like Wert, I would have rated ‘small town library tech workshop’ as about the least sexy event possible. The fact that the internet went nuts for cranky villagers clamoring to evict the bots from their phones really says something about Americans’ feelings about being involuntarily enrolled in the AI revolution."
