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Meet the AI — “Average Individual” — behind the viral ChatTJB billboard.
Claude and ChatGPT, meet your new competition: Tucker Bryant.
A 32-year-old former Google employee who describes himself as a conceptual artist and keynote speaker, Bryant is the one-man operation behind San Francisco’s latest viral billboard, a 14- by 48-foot ad on the corner of Sixth and Folsom streets that reads “ChatTJB: The leading chat interface powered by AI.”
The twist: AI in this case stands for “Average Individual.” TJB are just Bryant’s initials. And the chatbot isn’t powered by a large language model but by Bryant’s weary brain and tired fingers.
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Bryant has spent the last eight days engaged in an elaborate — and exhausting — piece of digital performance art. When people type prompts into his website, ChatTJB.org (opens in new tab), Bryant is the “AI” on the other end, typing back responses. He’s been at the keyboard for as many as 10 hours a day, offering chatbot-like answers as rapidly as he can type them.
“I’ve been learning through this process that if I don’t worry about spelling mistakes, I can type fast,” he said.
Bryant calls the project a “high-effort shitpost,” a rye commentary on the dangers of “cognitive surrender,” in which people get too comfortable outsourcing their thinking to AI. It’s also an elaborate spoof on the AI “hype cycle” in San Francisco, in which startups race to create the world’s most inscrutable — or rage-baiting — marketing messages.
“I feel like the only way to comment on that is by having skin in the game and playing in that same field,” he told The Standard. “So buying the billboard was just another way to prod at this, like, culture omniscience that AI has in the business world.”
He claims not to care about making money from the project, or promoting his career as a public speaker. He’s just in it for the art, he said.
Bryant originally wanted to call his site “BadGPT.com (opens in new tab),” but that particular domain would cost $38,000. So he settled for his own initials, for a mere $14 per month. As for the billboard, he learned that one sign along Highway 101 could cost more than $100,000 per month. (In fact, the most expensive billboards run as high as $3 million a year.) That wouldn’t do.
He considered putting his ads on bus shelters, assuming they would be cheaper, but the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency charges in the tens of thousands to buy ad space in bulk. So he settled for a $6,000-per-month billboard in SoMa that is partially obscured by a tree.
The location and sight lines are “pretty trash,” he admitted. “There is not a lot of traffic that can actually see it, but I just thought it’d be kind of funny to actually get the real thing.”
The rise of vibe-coding tools, which simplify the process of coding a website or app, has made it easier than ever for San Francisco techies to turn their inside jokes and gags into IRL concepts. Bryant said he can’t “write a lick of code,” but as a former marketing manager at Google and Wikihow, he knows the lingo of Silicon Valley. He studied at Stanford and has lived in the Bay since 2012.
He worked on ChatTJB in earnest over the past month. First came the website, which he designed over a weekend using the AI vibe-coding platform Lovable. The look of the ChatTJB site carries shades of other popular AI chatbots, though it’s sprinkled with reminders that this isn’t that deep.
“ChatTJB is a work of satire and a public art project,” reads a disclaimer at the bottom of the site. “It is also, genuinely, a working chat interface staffed by a real person. It is not a real investment opportunity.”
Bryant estimates that the site has received 15,000 prompts from about 11,000 people in the past week. The queries trickled in slowly at first, around 100 per day, with spurts every couple of hours. But things really blew up last Saturday after he posted a video of himself pointing to the billboard (opens in new tab), with the caption “My fingers hurt but i’m making friends.” His post has nearly 50,000 likes on Instagram.
At one point last week, Bryant was glued to his laptop answering prompts from 2 to 8 p.m. He took a couple of hours to break for dinner, then continued to answer questions until about 2 a.m. Bryant said he tried to sleep but got “a little bit stressed about prompts coming” and hopped back on around 5 a.m.
At its peak traffic over the weekend, the site received about 5,000 prompts in an hour, he said.
Chat topics have run the gamut, ranging from impossibly difficult math problems (Bryant hasn’t bothered looking up the answers) to personal queries. “I am on the first night of my honeymoon and I am not feeling relaxed,” said one. “Like, is that okay?”
He tried to offer an empathetic response, acknowledging the intensity of a big wedding day and encouraging the person to talk to their spouse if they were comfortable.
“It feels like people are just open to chat or open to at least having some exchange that feels personal, which has been really sweet,” he said.
To add to the chatbot aesthetic, Bryant designed a page for “ChatTJB Pro,” where users can pay for a $5 monthly subscription. As of Tuesday morning, he had exactly two patrons for the Pro tier.
“I don’t encourage anyone to actually subscribe,” he said. “It’s basically to pay off the billboard if anyone gets enough of a kick out of the joke that they feel like essentially donating to an art project.”
ChatTJB also offers image generation that evokes the archaic essence of MS Paint. In reality, the pictures are whatever Bryant can manage to quickly scrawl on the trackpad of his Macbook. One person asked for a frog eating spaghetti; another asked for “a Godzilla Daniel Lurie.”
To remind people that it is a mere human typing behind the chatbot, he sometimes adds notes to the site such as, “Hey, I’m going to Lowe’s. I’m going to be away for a while, or, like, I’m going to sleep,” he said.
The virality of this one-man project was one of the biggest surprises to him. While it’s meant to be a short-term project, he eventually wants to extend it to the community — with the proper safeguards — and allow other average individuals to reply to questions, human to human.
“The thing that people seem to be attaching to a bit more is just, like, getting help from an average person,” Bryant said. He puts the emphasis on “average.” These are not high-quality responses, he said; they’re “very, very mid. Objectively mid.”
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