{"id":625310,"date":"2026-08-07T12:22:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T12:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/625310\/"},"modified":"2026-08-07T12:22:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T12:22:12","slug":"the-hottest-new-ai-chatbot-is-just-a-guy-answering-your-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/625310\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hottest New AI Chatbot Is Just a Guy Answering Your Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

What if, instead of typing the next silly question you have into Claude<\/a> or ChatGPT<\/a>, you asked a random guy instead?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the idea behind ChatTJB. It\u2019s the creation of 32-year-old Tucker Bryant, a public speaker, artist, and former project manager at Google. A San Francisco billboard describes ChatTJB as \u201cthe leading chat interface powered by AI.\u201d In this case, though, AI stands for \u201caverage individual.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bryant didn\u2019t train an LLM to respond based on how he writes. He literally sits down and answers the prompts himself<\/a>. If you request an image of a skunk wearing sunglasses, he\u2019ll scribble one up. If you ask how to fry an egg, he\u2019ll respond with a suggestion. Maybe. (WIRED asked ChatTJB how to become a morning person, and at the time of writing, we haven\u2019t received a response. The website notes that \u201cthousands of people are writing in right now.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Bryant tells WIRED he launched ChatTJB back in April<\/a>, but it didn\u2019t take off until July 27, when his $6,000 billboard went up in San Francisco. News coverage soon followed<\/a>. As of August 6, he says, ChatTJB has received over 30,000 queries. At its peak, he says, he was receiving about 5,000 prompts per hour.<\/p>\n

Bryant says that he \u201cfirst and foremost\u201d considers ChatTJB to be an art project, not just a funny bit or a social experiment.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was sort of an opportunity for me to provide a little bit of commentary on a strange moment that I feel like we’re in,\u201d Bryant says. He doesn\u2019t consider himself anti-AI\u2014in fact, he vibe-coded the ChatTJB website using Lovable\u2014but he\u2019s clear-eyed about the risks of the technology.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s concerned about the risk of \u201ccognitive surrender<\/a>,\u201d which refers to accepting AI outputs with increasingly little critical thinking or scrutiny. He says the concept made him reflect on his own back-and-forths with LLMs, like the time he asked if he should wear short or long sleeves on a 65-degree day in San Francisco.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then I’m like, dude, I’ve been living in this city for whatever, like seven years,\u201d Bryant says. \u201cLike, I know how to handle the weather. And yet, it felt like an easier thing for me to defer to a LLM for advice on that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt felt like something that I wanted to speak on,\u201d he adds, \u201cbecause I was like, what am I doing here?\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the past couple of days, he has drawn a frog eating spaghetti, San Francisco mayor David Lurie as Godzilla, and two black cats eating grass on a table, among other things. The written requests, Bryant says, have been diverse.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople were asking things like, \u2018Oh, it’s my birthday in two weeks, and I don’t really want to have a party\u2014what do you think I should do?\u2019\u201d Bryant says. Other people ask what they should have for dinner or how they can use the ingredients in their fridge.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people initially were interacting with this thing as a joke or as a funny thing,\u201d Bryant says. \u201cAnd then I think when they realized that they could chat and get actual conversation, some of what people would share would be more personal, sincere, genuine, et cetera.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bryant is quick to note that he\u2019s not a good artist, and his advice is no better than any other person\u2019s. (On YouTube, he described<\/a> it as \u201cthe worst LLM of all time.\u201d) But he thinks people understand that.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe way I’m interpreting it is that the value for them is just getting a human to bounce those questions off of, as opposed to getting super expert advice,\u201d Bryant says. \u201cIt’s very tender to see.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What if, instead of typing the next silly question you have into Claude or ChatGPT, you asked a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":625311,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,595,289,290,5059,297,18,19,17,82],"class_list":["post-625310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-art","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-chatbots","tag-chatgpt","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117054206539356424","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625310\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}