A New AI Chatbot Is Taking The Bay Area By Storm — But There's A Catch

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — There's a new leading AI chat interface in the Bay Area, but there's nothing artificial about it.

ChatTJB, all in all, is AI. But it's not artificial intelligence; instead, it's just an "average individual" named Tucker Bryant answering questions.

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"ChatTJB is a next-generation, single-operator large language experience (LLE) built on a human-grounded inference layer," the platform's website reads. "In practice: you ask a question, and a person named Tucker reads it, thinks about it, and writes back when awake and motivated."

Bryant, a former Google employee, says he started ChatTJB as a joke, but also as an art project. It's meant as a commentary on the dangers of "cognitive surrender," where people get too comfortable letting AI think for them, Bryant told the SF Standard.

When a huge billboard advertising the new interface appeared overnight in the city, Bryant began getting thousands of questions from people using ChatTJB.

The newfound attention was more than Tucker had anticipated, according to his site. At the project's peak, he received up to 5,000 questions per hour.

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As a result, he's working to expand ChatTJB into a community project, where people from the broader community will help the former Google employee answer questions.

People can visit ChatTJB to explore the possibility of becoming one of several "average individuals" answering questions, according to an announcement on the site.

Tucker, meanwhile, will be mostly answering on the platform's "Pro" tier, which was created as part of the "bit," but has now become a means of support to help him pay off "that billboard."

"This tier mostly exists because I don't expect anyone to actually sign up and it will give me a chance to rest my fingers once volunteers are helping out in the main tier," Bryant says online. "Please don't actually subscribe unless you really just want to help pay for this billboard or otherwise supporting some strange art. This is a worthless tier. I love you."