For years, workers have been warned that AI was coming for their jobs. Now, 32-year-old Tucker Bryant decided to return the favor.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The former Google<\/a> employee built ChatTJB, a chatbot that looks a lot like the AI assistants Silicon Valley has spent trillions of dollars developing. It looks just like a normal chat box and follows the same process: users type a question and wait for an answer. The catch? There\u2019s no large language model on the other side\u2014just Bryant, or increasingly, one of the more than 10,000 people who\u2019ve applied to help him answer all those questions.<\/p>\n And questions there are plenty of: more than 100,000 prompts have been submitted since Bryant\u2019s $6,000 San Francisco billboard advertising the site went up, he told Fortune. That\u2019s not all: Bryant said the volunteer waitlist is growing by roughly 1,000 people a day, turning what started as an art project about AI dependence into a strange reversal of the AI boom\u2019s defining anxiety. At a moment when companies are racing to make machines behave more like people, Bryant has found an audience for the opposite: people behaving like machines.<\/p>\n The \u2018AI\u2019 stands for average individual<\/p>\n Bryant, a former Google project manager and keynote speaker, launched ChatTJB in April. The site looked like the stripped-down interfaces that have been ubiquitous since ChatGPT<\/a>: a text box, a question and eventually an answer from Bryant, who reads and answers the prompts himself.\u00a0<\/p>\n He made the joke harder to miss this summer with a billboard advertising ChatTJB as a \u201cleading chat interface powered by AI.\u201d A small asterisk on the ad revealed what AI meant: \u201caverage individual.\u201d Though, fittingly, part of the disclaimer was obscured by a tree branch when Bryant shared a photo of it on Instagram.<\/p>\n The billboard landed in a city where advertisements for artificial intelligence have become nearly inescapable. In 2024, AI startup Artisan drew attention for its own provocative billboard campaign urging companies to \u201cStop Hiring Humans,\u201d according to the San Francisco Chronicle<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bryant told Fortune the honeymoon-night message is the one he keeps coming back to: someone wrote in on the first night of their honeymoon, saying they didn\u2019t feel totally relaxed, and asked if that was okay to feel.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI think that was the moment the project began to shift from a surreal piece of satire into a place for people to chat in earnest with a well-meaning, if undeniably average, human being,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n He\u2019s since largely stepped back himself. \u201cRight now, I\u2019ve mostly stopped answering,\u201d Bryant said after the pace of prompts\u2014more than 5,000 an hour at its peak\u2014eclipsed what one person could handle. He put out a call for other volunteering\u00a0 \u201cAverage Individuals\u201d to take over instead.<\/p>\n ChatTJB wasn\u2019t built to make money. But its unexpected popularity has opened the door to something Bryant hadn\u2019t necessarily planned.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve had a couple of conversations with people interested in working on the project in various ways,\u201d Bryant. But for now, Bryant still thinks of ChatTJB as a short-term art project among several he wants to pursue. Still, he\u2019s keeping his options open.\u201cIf the right partner wanted to help turn this into a sustainable project, I\u2019d love to talk with them,\u201d Bryant said.<\/p>\n What happens when no one questions AI<\/p>\n The project began from Bryant\u2019s concern that people were outsourcing more and more of their thinking to AI without scrutinizing the answers they received.<\/p>\n Bryant caught himself asking an AI whether to wear short or long sleeves on a 65-degree day in a city where he had lived for seven years, he told Wired<\/a>. His partner introduced him to a term for what he was doing: \u201ccognitive surrender.\u201d<\/p>\n