Meet ChatTJB, the “AI” chatbot with no AI, no algorithm and no LLM. It’s just one guy and 10,000 volunteers typing back

For years, workers have been warned that AI was coming for their jobs. Now, 32-year-old Tucker Bryant decided to return the favor. 

The former Google 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’s no large language model on the other side—just Bryant, or increasingly, one of the more than 10,000 people who’ve applied to help him answer all those questions.

And questions there are plenty of: more than 100,000 prompts have been submitted since Bryant’s $6,000 San Francisco billboard advertising the site went up, he told Fortune. That’s 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’s 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.

The ‘AI’ stands for average individual

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 text box, a question and eventually an answer from Bryant, who reads and answers the prompts himself. 

He made the joke harder to miss this summer with a billboard advertising ChatTJB as a “leading chat interface powered by AI.” A small........

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