A San Francisco billboard went up in the SoMa district on July 27 promising a chat interface "powered by AI." The fine print revealed the punchline: AI stood for "Average Individual." Behind the service, called ChatTJB, is a single person — Tucker Bryant, a 32-year-old artist and former Google employee — typing out every response by hand.
Bryant launched the project quietly in April 2026, then spent $6,000 on the billboard to promote it. The stunt worked far better than he expected. More than 100,000 prompts have been submitted to the site since the billboard appeared, according to Fortune, with traffic peaking at roughly 5,000 queries an hour. More than 10,000 people have volunteered to help answer questions, and Bryant says the waitlist of would-be responders is growing by about 1,000 people a day.
Bryant describes ChatTJB as "artisanal intelligence, handcrafted by a single human being" and a "single-operator large language experience." He has framed the project as a pointed critique of what Wharton researchers Steven D. Shaw and Gideon Nave call "cognitive surrender" — the tendency of people to defer to AI-generated answers without scrutinizing them, even on questions they could easily reason through themselves. Bryant has said the idea crystallized after he caught himself asking an AI assistant whether to wear short or long sleeves on a 65-degree day, in a city he had lived in for seven years.
The Wharton research Bryant cites found that people who leaned on AI assistance were more accurate when the AI happened to be right, but when the AI gave incorrect advice, their accuracy fell by 15 percentage points compared with people who received no AI help at all.
It restores a human trace that highly scalable AI interfaces tend to remove.
Steven D. Shaw, Wharton School
Shaw has argued that ChatTJB's appeal has less to do with speed than with a craving for something recognizably human on the other end of the conversation, even a slow and occasionally cranky one. The San Francisco Standard and other outlets have noted the responses can be delayed, cryptic or simply wrong, in keeping with the bit.
Bryant has since stepped back from answering every message personally and is weighing how to keep the project sustainable, including turning it into a longer-running community effort staffed by volunteers. "I'm going to move slowly," he has said, cautious about scaling a joke about scale into an actual operation.