Overview
- The project debuted after Tucker James Bryant put a SoMa billboard live on July 27 that billed ChatTJB as an AI chat while a small asterisk explained that “AI” means “average individual.”
- After a viral Instagram post the site flooded with traffic, peaking at about 5,000 queries in an hour and accumulating roughly 30,000 total submissions across days.
- Bryant temporarily paused the service to avoid burnout and now has reopened it with a small roster of vetted volunteer responders, an onboarding quiz, message triage and filters for abusive content.
- Bryant used AI tools to build the site but says every reply is written by a person, sometimes aided by web searches, and the project includes an optional low-cost support tier that few people have paid.
- As an art stunt critiquing blind trust in machine outputs, ChatTJB highlights limits of automated-style interfaces, raises questions about user safety and privacy when humans read private queries, and shows how physical ads can drive large online attention.