Former Google employee's 'AI' chatbot ChatTJB uses 10,000 humans to answer your questions

This AI Chatbot Was Just One Busy Guy, and He Has Hit His Limit - CNET

People ask Tucker Bryant's ChatTJB for advice on everything from their fiction and personal dilemmas to how they should spend their free time. The early history of AI will be remembered for the rise and fall of many chatbot services. Remember Microsoft Tay? Maybe it's best if you don't. But one interesting footnote in that history will be the rapid ascent of ChatTJB, a chatbot service with a twist. Its creator, an artist named Tucker Bryant, was answering all the questions submitted himself. That means a human was responding to literally thousands of queries, including sending quick human-generated drawings, to people who used the service after seeing a San Francisco billboard Bryant paid $6,000 to put up in late July, as Wired reported. Now, after ChatTJB went viral, Bryant put out a call for volunteers to serve as AI ("Average Individuals") to keep the project sustainable and has paused questions on the site while he regroups. Bryant created a $5 donation tier called "ChatTJB Pro," but is now begging visitors not to subscribe to it. As he writes on the website, "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." So far, he says, he's only made $300 from donations. As Bryant told CNET in an email, ChatTJB will return in some form. "It'll come back, at least temporarily, in the short term," he said. "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. " Bypassing the paused ChatTJB website entirely, Tucker took time to answer some questions from CNET over email: CNET: You've answered so many questions already from so many people -- what is the question people ask most frequently, and what's your typical answer to that? Tucker Bryant: The most frequent question has been along the lines of "why are you doing this?" I've sort of alternated between two answers: The high-brow answer has been to encourage people to stay curious about their, and the world's, relationship to technology at a time when AI is doing incredible things, but may also be changing our perceptions and behavior in ways it's healthy for us to stay aware of. The other answer has been that I thought it would be really funny. Both answers are equally true. When the Wired story was published, you'd only gotten four donations totaling $20. Has that upticked at all with the additional attention? Will you be able to pay off the billboard and make a living at this, maybe? I'm really grateful to the people who've supported the project! That said, I've made less than $300 in donations and subscriptions to ChatTJB Pro (which explicitly adds no features whatsoever and is just a tip jar with a satirical name), so I certainly haven't paid off the billboard or the cost of running the site. Ultimately, that's OK, because I really just wanted to start a conversation with this project and hopefully make some people smile in the process. Since this isn't the work that pays me -- and because it has been pretty taxing on a few levels -- I'm still thinking of it as one short-term art project among several that I want to have room for. That said, over 10,000 people have applied to volunteer, and the rate of prompts has been crazy, so it would be really cool if the right operating partner or supporter wanted to turn it into something sustainable. Have you learned anything about how humans are responding to AI or anything about yourself in the process? It's hard to say with sincerity that I now know more about how humans interact with AI, since people on the other end of ChatTJB know they're talking to a human, 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. They ask, "What do you think of this piece of fiction I wrote?" or, "Do you think I was wrong in this situation?" or, "What should I do with my free time today?" Those questions kind of remind me of a person trying on an outfit in a mirror and asking a friend in the room if they look OK. I think the assurance that somebody cares enough to respond, no matter how mundane the topic, has been meaningful for some people. Obviously, some people are big AI enthusiasts, while others are very anti-AI. Where do you fall on that spectrum? Has that changed since you started ChatTJB? I definitely wouldn't call myself anti-AI - I'm not a technical person, so I wouldn't have been able to create something like this three or four years ago, before AI's help. 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, and about the tenor of the cultural conversation around AI (hence the billboard), especially with all the speculation of [an AI] bubble. I saw on the site today that TJB is paused - any estimate on when it might return? 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. My promise has consistently been that the volunteers would be the first to hear of any updates like those, so I plan to let them know as soon as I do.

This Former Google Employee Created an 'AI' Chatbot That Lets You Speak to An Actual Human

Now Bryant has paused ChatTJB in response to an unprecedented surge in traffic. The trendiest new AI chatbot is just 10,000 human volunteers manually answering your questions. Former Google project manager Tucker Bryant recently created an AI chatbot called ChatTJB that doesn't use AI at all. Instead, the AI stands for "Average Individual." The project started in April with him on the other side of the screen, manually answering questions. ChatTJB looked uncannily like the AI assistants Silicon Valley has poured trillions of dollars into building. A user typed a question into a plain chat box, waited a moment and got a response. The project exploded after Bryant spent $6,000 on a San Francisco billboard promoting ChatTJB in late July. Since it went up, the site has received more than 100,000 prompts, he told Fortune, while the volunteer list has been growing by about 1,000 names a day. At the time of writing, Bryant has paused ChatTJB in response to the surge in traffic. The project is notable because instead of machines replacing people, people are lining up to act like machines. From satire to sincerity One message in particular changed how Bryant viewed the project. On the first night of their honeymoon, a user wrote in to say they couldn't fully relax and asked whether that was normal. Bryant said it was the moment ChatTJB began to feel less like surreal satire and more like a place where people genuinely wanted to talk to "a well-meaning, if undeniably average, human being." ChatTJB was never meant to be a business. But its sudden popularity has created opportunities Bryant didn't necessarily expect. "I've had a couple of conversations with people interested in working on the project in different ways," he said. Even so, he still sees ChatTJB as a temporary art project, one of several ideas he wants to explore. That said, he isn't ruling anything out. "If the right partner wanted to help turn this into a sustainable project, I'd love to talk with them," Bryant said. The risk of outsourcing thought The idea for ChatTJB grew out of Bryant's unease with how easily people can hand everyday decisions over to AI without pausing to question its answer. He told Wired that he caught himself asking an AI chatbot if he should wear short sleeves or long sleeves on a 65-degree day in a city where he had lived for seven years. His partner had a name for that habit: "cognitive surrender." The term comes from research by Wharton professors Steven D. Shaw and Gideon Nave, who studied what happens when people lean too heavily on AI guidance. "When people hear the term, they immediately recognize the phenomenon, both in others and often in themselves," Shaw told Fortune. "Academic work can define and measure a phenomenon, but art can communicate its emotional stakes in a way that a research paper rarely can."