There’s a new AI on the block — but not the kind you’re thinking.
A billboard in San Francisco is marketing a service called ChatTJB, which the giant ad boasts is the “leading chatbot interface powered by AI.” But as noted in a tiny — and partially obscured by a tree — disclaimer on the bottom of the billboard, “AI” in this case doesn’t stand for artificial intelligence. Instead, it stands for “average individual.” Indeed, when you chat with ChatTJB, you’re chatting with a single human man named Tucker Bryant.
“I just built the worst [large language model] of all time, and it’s about to revolutionize everything,” Bryant, an artist and former Google staffer, explained in a social media video. “Picture this: ChatGPT, but on the other end it’s just me giving bad advice. Manually.”
On an “About” page, ChatTJB, which was first reported by the local San Francisco outlet Gazetteer SF, is described as “artisanal intelligence, handcrafted by a single human being.” Instead of an LLM, the page adds, this bespoke experience can be understood as a “single-operator large language experience,” or LLE.
“Rather than sampling from a probabilistic model, each query is resolved through a proprietary biological reasoning substrate, delivering responses that are fully interpretable, non-synthetic, and accountable at the source,” the website continues. “In practice: you ask a question, and a person named Tucker reads it, thinks about it, and writes back when awake and motivated.”
In a video, Bryant pointed to the phenomenon of “cognitive surrender” to AI as his motivation for the project. Coined in a study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, the term describes the tendency of chatbot users to outsource their critical thinking as they follow the confidently-stated advice of chatbots, even when that advice is false or misleading.
“We’re now so used to confident, fast, and smart-sounding answers from AI that we’ve largely stopped questioning them,” Bryant said in the video. “To be clear, I’m not anti-AI, but some of us are so far gone that the second we drop into that soothing dark interface, see the little thinking animation, and the text coming up letter by letter, critical thinking skills go out the window.”
ChatTJB, Bryant adds, adds friction back into the chatbot experience, simply by being “infinitely worse.” It’s not anti-AI, but it is pro-thinking your own thoughts.
“My answers will be slow. They probably won’t be correct, or maybe they could be, but they’ll be very cryptic,” said Bryant. “You will have a bad experience with ChatTJB.”
In addition to typed responses, ChatTJB also responds to requests to generate imagery with hand-drawn pictures. A disclaimer on the website notes that the service is a “work of satire and a public art project,” and not a real investment opportunity. Though if you want to help Bryant pay off the billboard, you can sign up for a “Pro” subscription.
“I want you to have such an inconvenient experience with something that aesthetically looks like artificial intelligence that the next time an LLM gives you what sounds like a reasonable answer, you remember the time ChatTJB responded to your tax question with a haiku about crows,” said Bryant, and “you become the tiniest bit more likely to pause and remember that just because a smooth-talking chatbot can answer your questions with polish, that doesn’t give you an excuse to not think.”
“The next evolution in artificial intelligence,” he added, “is human absurdity.”
More on “cognitive surrender”: Alarming Study Finds That Most People Just Do What ChatGPT Tells Them, Even If It’s Totally Wrong
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