Tucker Bryant stared at the flood of messages. Thousands poured in hourly after his billboard went live in San Francisco. He typed replies himself. Drew crude sketches when asked. Offered advice on birthdays, dinner recipes, even whether to wear short sleeves in the city’s famous fog. Then the volume hit a wall. One person could not keep up.
So Bryant paused the site. He put out a call for volunteers. Over 10,000 people signed up to act as “Average Individuals,” the true meaning behind the AI label on his project. The stunt that began as satire became something more revealing. It exposed a quiet hunger for human connection in an age of instant machine answers.
Bryant, a 32-year-old artist, former Google project manager and public speaker, launched ChatTJB in April. Few noticed at first. He built the simple chat interface with no coding experience. The concept was straightforward. Users typed questions. Bryant read them. He responded in his own words. No large language model. No training data. Just him.
“It 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,” Bryant told WIRED. He watched friends and colleagues turn to AI for weather advice they already knew. He called it cognitive surrender. People deferring judgment to algorithms without a second thought. His project poked at that habit.
Everything changed at the end of July. Bryant spent $6,000 on a billboard in SoMa. It advertised a “leading chat interface powered by AI.” The punchline appeared only if you visited chattjb.org. There, a note explained that AI stood for Average Individual. The billboard video spread online. Traffic exploded. CNET reported that queries topped 30,000 by early August. At peak, more than 5,000 prompts arrived per hour.
He worked up to 10 hours a day. Some replies included hand-drawn images. A frog eating spaghetti. The San Francisco mayor reimagined as Godzilla. Two cats munching grass. Users asked for help writing fiction. They shared personal dilemmas. They wanted suggestions on how to spend free time. Many started with jokes but shifted to sincere conversation once they realized a real person sat on the other side.
“A lot of people initially were interacting with this thing as a joke or as a funny thing, and 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,” Bryant explained in the WIRED interview. The tenderness surprised him. People valued the chance to bounce ideas off another human. Not expert insight. Just presence.
The most common question? Why are you doing this?
Bryant alternated answers. One response encouraged curiosity about technology and humanity’s ties to it. The other simply said he thought it would be funny. Both were true. He does not oppose AI. He used tools to help build the site’s interface. Yet he wants sharper critical thinking as speculation swirls around an AI investment bubble. “I definitely wouldn’t call myself anti-AI,” he told CNET. “I think that’s really cool, as are a lot of the other things AI is empowering people to do. I just want people to keep thinking critically about our own relationship to these tools.”
By mid-August the load proved unsustainable. Bryant stepped back. “Right now, I’ve mostly stopped answering,” he informed Fortune. The site now sits quiet while he organizes. More than 10,000 volunteers have applied. The waitlist grows by about 1,000 names daily. He has brought in a small group of helpers already. But scaling thoughtfully takes time.
He added a ChatTJB Pro tier for $5 a month. It offers nothing special. Bryant actively discourages subscriptions. “i actively discourage you from subscribing to it because it is a stupid and worthless tier that only exists to give my fingers a break and help me pay off that ridiculous billboard if anyone was planning on literally like burning five dollars for tinder,” he wrote. So far he has collected less than $300. The billboard debt remains.
“I’m really grateful to the people who’ve supported the project!” Bryant shared with CNET. Still, the sums fall far short of costs. He sees this as a short-term art project, not a full-time occupation. “It’ll come back, at least temporarily, in the short term. In the long-term, the site needs more support than I can give it since I don’t intend for this to become my full-time job, but if the right partner shows up, I’d love for it to keep going.”
Recent coverage highlights the project’s evolution. Fortune noted the total prompts now exceed 100,000. The reversal feels striking. While the AI industry races toward ever-larger models and lower friction, Bryant introduced deliberate slowness and human imperfection. Responses arrive slowly. They carry quirks. Sometimes they include bad drawings. That friction, one commentator observed, restores a human trace that scalable AI often erases.
Users appear to crave exactly that. They don’t always seek perfect answers. The act of sharing with someone who listens and replies with care fills a gap. Bryant has not claimed grand insights into human-AI interaction. “It’s hard to say with sincerity that I now know more about how humans interact with AI,” he admitted to CNET. “but I can offer that people who interact with a single, anonymous person who is there specifically because they want to help seem to appreciate the opportunity to just bounce things off of another human being.”
And yet the experiment lands at a telling time. Billions flow into AI development. Companies promise superhuman assistants. Governments debate regulation. Everyday users grow wary of hallucinations, bias and job displacement. Against that backdrop, a guy with a billboard and a keyboard delivers something different. No hype. No trillion-parameter model. Just conversation. With all its limits.
Bryant plans to update volunteers first when the service returns. He hopes the project makes “a weird time sit a little bit lighter.” The best outcome, in his view, might be modest. A few more people pause before outsourcing their thinking. They question the tools. They remember that behind every interface sits a choice about what kind of intelligence they truly want.
The billboard comes down soon. The questions keep arriving. Bryant and his growing team of Average Individuals will decide how, or whether, to answer them. One thing feels clear. The joke has revealed a deeper truth. Sometimes the most advanced response is the one written by hand.