Imagine a senior dev at 3am, staring at a Copilot suggestion that is technically correct but logically hollow. He realizes he hasn’t actually solved a hard problem from scratch in six months; he’s just been auditing a probabilistic parrot. He closes the laptop, feels a sudden, visceral need to touch a physical book, and starts searching for the nearest public library.
In short: no. Trying to “avoid” AI in 2026 is like trying to avoid microplastics while drinking from a plastic bottle. It is baked into the kernel, the browser, and the basic API calls of every SaaS product we use. Even if you scrub your local environment, you’re still interacting with models that have digested every line of your public GitHub repos.
The TechCrunch report on “Avoiding AI” workshops highlights a growing frustration, but the technical reality is that the “off” switch has been removed. We’ve moved past the era of optional plugins into the era of forced integration. You can use a “dumb” text editor, but the moment you hit “send” on an email, three different LLMs are probably analyzing the sentiment of your prose (and probably for the best, given how bad most corporate emails are).
Librarians are the original curators of truth. They spend their lives fighting against misinformation and poor provenance, making them the natural enemy of the hallucination. For a librarian, a model that confidently cites a non-existent legal precedent isn’t just a “bug”—it’s an affront to the very concept of a library.
These workshops aren’t just about teaching people how to use a VPN or find non-indexed websites. They are about reclaiming the cognitive process of research. There is a specific, tactile joy in following a trail of citations across three different physical volumes that a “summarize this” button simply cannot replicate. Who actually wants a “smart” toaster that requires a subscription to brown the bread? The library is the last place where the human is the primary processor.
From a financial perspective, absolutely not. A few viral workshops in a handful of cities won’t dent the quarterly earnings of Microsoft or Google. The capital expenditure on H100s is already sunk; the models are already deployed. Big Tech doesn’t care if you’re “fed up” as long as you’re still using the OS.
But culturally, this is a signal of saturation. We are seeing the first real wave of “AI fatigue,” where the novelty has worn off and the friction—the latency, the monthly subscription fees, the weirdly polite tone of the bots—has become unbearable. It’s a rebellion against the claustrophobia of an interface that tries to finish every sentence for you.
It’s a losing battle.
The real issue here isn’t the tech itself, but the arrogance of the implementation. We were told these tools would free us from drudgery, yet most of us just spend more time fixing the errors the AI introduced. We aren’t fighting the existence of neural networks; we’re fighting the forced adoption of a mediocre middleman in every single digital interaction.
By Q4, we’ll see “Human-Only” or “AI-Free” certifications appearing on professional portfolios as a way to signal actual skill in a sea of synthetic output. It will become a luxury brand. The ability to write a clean, efficient function without a prompt will be the new “hand-crafted” label.
The workshops are quaint, but the sentiment is valid. We’ve spent three years sprinting toward a future where we don’t have to think, and now a significant number of people are realizing that thinking was the only part of the job they actually liked.
