“假AI”ChatTJB火了:没有算法、没有大模型,背后全是真人

当全行业都在疯狂迭代AI算法、追求机器无限逼近人类时，一个反向走红的“伪AI聊天机器人”颠覆了所有人的认知。

前谷歌员工打造的ChatTJB，顶着AI智能对话的外壳，内核却无任何大模型、无算法加持，从单人手动回复到万名志愿者接力应答。这场荒诞又清醒的艺术实验，撕开了当下最普遍的时代困境：我们过度依赖智能AI，渐渐陷入“认知屈服”，而笨拙、真实、有温度的人工回复，恰恰找回了AI时代稀缺的人性痕迹。

| Fortune

Meet ChatTJB, the ‘AI’ chatbot with no AI, no algorithm and no LLM. It’s just one guy and the 10,000 people who volunteered to type back

For years, workers have been warned that AI was coming for their jobs.

多年来，职场人一直被警告：人工智能迟早会抢走他们的饭碗。

Now, 32-year-old Tucker Bryant decided to return the favor.

如今，32岁的塔克·布莱恩特决定反过来“抢AI的饭碗”。

The former Google employee built ChatTJB, a chatbot that looks a lot like the AI assistants Silicon Valley has spent trillions of dollars developing.

这位前谷歌员工打造了ChatTJB，一个看起来与硅谷斥资数万亿美元开发的AI助手几乎一模一样的聊天机器人。

It looks just like a normal chat box and follows the same process: users type a question and wait for an answer.

它看起来就是一个普通的聊天框，使用流程也完全一样：用户输入问题，然后等待回复。

The catch? There's no large language model on the other side—just Bryant, or increasingly, one of the more than 10,000 people who've applied to help him answer all those questions.

但反转来了：聊天框的另一头根本没有大语言模型，只有布莱恩特本人——而如今，越来越多的时候，回复者是那一万多名申请帮他回答问题的人中的一位。

And questions there are plenty of: more than 100,000 prompts have been submitted since Bryant's $6,000 San Francisco billboard advertising the site went up, he told Fortune.

而提问还真是源源不断。布莱恩特告诉《财富》杂志，自从他花6000美元在旧金山投放广告牌宣传这个网站以来，收到的提问已经超过10万条。

That's not all: Bryant said the volunteer waitlist is growing by roughly 1,000 people a day, turning what started as an art project about AI dependence into a strange reversal of the AI boom's defining anxiety.

还不止如此。布莱恩特说，志愿者候补名单每天还在增加大约1000人，让这个最初探讨人们依赖AI的艺术项目，变成了对AI热潮中那种核心焦虑的一次荒诞反转。

At a moment when companies are racing to make machines behave more like people, Bryant has found an audience for the opposite: people behaving like machines.

当各家公司都在争相让机器变得越来越像人时，布莱恩特却让完全相反的一幕有了观众：让真人像机器一样工作。

The 'AI' stands for average individual

这里的“AI”，指的是“普通人”

Bryant, a former Google project manager and keynote speaker, launched ChatTJB in April.

布莱恩特曾任谷歌项目经理，也是一名主题演讲者，他于4月推出了ChatTJB。

The site looked like the stripped-down interfaces that have been ubiquitous since ChatGPT: a text box, a question and eventually an answer from Bryant, who reads and answers the prompts himself.

这个网站采用了自ChatGPT问世以来随处可见的极简界面：一个文本框、一条提问，过一段时间便会收到布莱恩特的回答。所有问题都由他亲自阅读并回复。

He made the joke harder to miss this summer with a billboard advertising ChatTJB as a "leading chat interface powered by AI".

今年夏天，他又用一块广告牌把这个玩笑说得更明白：广告称ChatTJB是“由AI驱动的领先聊天界面”。

A small asterisk on the ad revealed what AI meant: "average individual".

广告上的一个小星号揭开了谜底：这里的AI指的是“普通人”。

Though, fittingly, part of the disclaimer was obscured by a tree branch when Bryant shared a photo of it on Instagram.

颇为应景的是，布莱恩特把广告牌的照片发到Instagram时，这段说明的一部分恰好被树枝挡住了。

The billboard landed in a city where advertisements for artificial intelligence have become nearly inescapable.

这块广告牌出现在旧金山——一座如今几乎到处都能看到人工智能广告的城市。

In 2024, AI startup Artisan drew attention for its own provocative billboard campaign urging companies to "Stop Hiring Humans", according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

据《旧金山纪事报》报道，2024年，AI初创公司Artisan也曾凭借一组挑衅性的广告牌引发关注，呼吁企业“别再雇人了”。

Bryant told Fortune the honeymoon-night message is the one he keeps coming back to: someone wrote in on the first night of their honeymoon, s aying they didn't feel totally relaxed, and asked if that was okay to feel.

布莱恩特告诉《财富》杂志，最让他念念不忘的，是一条来自新婚之夜的留言：有人在蜜月第一晚发来消息，说自己始终无法完全放松下来，便问有这种感觉是否正常。

"I think that was the moment the project began to shift from a surreal piece of satire into a place for people to chat in earnest with a well-meaning, if undeniably average, human being," he said.

“我想，正是在那一刻，这个项目开始从一件超现实的讽刺作品，转变成一个让人们可以认真聊天的地方——聊天对象是一个心怀善意、但确实再普通不过的真人，” 他说。

He's since largely stepped back himself.

此后，他本人基本退到了幕后。

"Right now, I've mostly stopped answering," Bryant said after the pace of prompts—more than 5,000 an hour at its peak—eclipsed what one person could handle.

“现在，我基本已经不亲自回复了。”布莱恩特说。提问高峰时每小时超过5000条，远远超出了一个人能应付的范围。

He put out a call for other volunteering "Average Individuals" to take over instead.

于是，他公开招募其他自愿加入的“普通人”，来接手回复工作。

ChatTJB wasn't built to make money.

ChatTJB从一开始就不是为了赚钱。

But its unexpected popularity has opened the door to something Bryant hadn't necessarily planned.

但它意外走红，也给布莱恩特带来了原本未曾计划过的新可能。

"I've had a couple of conversations with people interested in working on the project in various ways," Bryant.

“我已经和一些有兴趣以不同方式参与这个项目的人聊过几次，” 布莱恩特说。

But for now, Bryant still thinks of ChatTJB as a short-term art project among several he wants to pursue.

不过目前，布莱恩特仍把ChatTJB看作自己想尝试的几个短期艺术项目之一。

Still, he's keeping his options open.

不过，他也没有排除其他可能。

"If the right partner wanted to help turn this into a sustainable project, I'd love to talk with them," Bryant said.

“如果有合适的合作伙伴愿意帮忙，把它变成一个可持续运营的项目，我很乐意和对方聊聊，” 布莱恩特说。

What happens when no one questions AI

当没有人再质疑AI时，会发生什么？

The project began from Bryant's concern that people were outsourcing more and more of their thinking to AI without scrutinizing the answers they received.

这个项目源于布莱恩特的担忧：人们正把越来越多的思考交给AI，却不再认真审视AI给出的答案。

Bryant caught himself asking an AI whether to wear short or long sleeves on a 65-degree day in a city where he had lived for seven years, he told Wired.

他告诉《连线》杂志，有一次，在一个自己已经生活了七年的城市里，面对65华氏度、也就是约18摄氏度的天气，他竟然还去问AI该穿短袖还是长袖。

His partner introduced him to a term for what he was doing: "cognitive surrender".

他的伴侣告诉他，这种行为有一个名字：“认知屈服”。

Bryant's project was inspired by 2026 research on the phenomenon from Wharton professors Steven D. Shaw and Gideon Nave, who coined the term "cognitive surrender" after finding that people who relied on AI assistance were more accurate when the AI was right.

布莱恩特的项目灵感来自沃顿商学院教授史蒂文·D·肖和吉迪恩·纳维在2026年开展的一项相关研究，两位教授发现，当AI的建议正确时，依赖AI辅助的人判断得更准确，并据此提出了“认知屈服”这个说法。

But when the AI gave incorrect advice, their accuracy fell by 15 percentage points compared with people who received no AI assistance.

但当AI给出错误建议时，他们的准确率却比完全没有使用AI辅助的人低15个百分点。

"When people hear the term, they immediately recognize the phenomenon, both in others and often in themselves," Shaw told Fortune.

“人们一听到这个词，马上就能认出这种现象——既能在别人身上看到，也常常能在自己身上看到，”肖告诉《财富》杂志。

"Academic work can define and measure a phenomenon, but art can communicate its emotional stakes in a way that a research paper rarely can."

“学术研究可以定义和衡量一种现象，但艺术能够传达它在情感上的分量，而这往往是研究论文难以做到的。”

ChatTJB also introduces something most AI companies are trying to eliminate: friction.

ChatTJB还重新带回了大多数AI公司都在努力消除的一样东西：摩擦感。

Users might wait hours for an answer, responses aren't infinitely scalable, and the person on the other end may offer a perspective that's personal rather than authoritative.

用户可能要等上几个小时才能收到回复，回复能力也无法无限扩展，而屏幕另一头的人给出的，可能只是个人看法，而不是权威答案。

But Shaw cautioned against interpreting ChatTJB's popularity as evidence that people actually want their technology to become slower.

不过肖提醒，不要把ChatTJB的流行解读为人们真的希望技术变得更慢。

"I would not conclude that people generally prefer slow or inefficient AI tools," he said.

“我不会由此认定，人们普遍更喜欢缓慢或低效的AI工具，” 他说。

"ChatTJB is art."

“ChatTJB是一件艺术作品。”

Shaw and Nave tried several ways to reduce cognitive surrender in their experiments, including time pressure, incentives and feedback, but found it difficult to eliminate.

肖和纳维在实验中尝试了多种方法来减少“认知屈服”，包括施加时间压力、设置激励和提供反馈，但发现这种现象很难彻底消除。

Other researchers have explored "cognitive forcing techniques", such as slowing responses or designing systems that push back and ask users questions.

其他研究人员还探索过所谓的“认知强制技术”，比如放慢回复速度，或者设计出会提出质疑、反问用户的系统，促使人们自己思考。

The challenge, Shaw said, is introducing enough friction to make people scrutinize AI's answers without making the technology so cumbersome that users simply choose a faster competitor.

肖说，难点在于：既要增加足够的阻力，让人们认真审视AI的答案，又不能让技术变得过于麻烦，否则用户只会直接选择速度更快的竞争产品。

"The more useful and efficient AI becomes, the easier it is to rely on it without much reflection," he said.

“AI越有用、越高效，人们就越容易不加思考地依赖它，” 他说。

For Shaw, the appeal of something like ChatTJB isn't necessarily that people want worse technology.

在肖看来，ChatTJB这类项目之所以有吸引力，并不一定是因为人们想要更差的技术。

It's that it gives them something a highly scalable chatbot cannot quite replicate.

而是因为它提供了一种高度可扩展的聊天机器人无法完全复制的东西。

"It tells us that people want more than instant information; they want to remain human," Shaw said.

“这说明，人们想要的不只是即时信息；他们还想保留自己作为人的感觉，” 肖说。

The waiting and scarcity, he added, may even make Bryant's eventual responses feel more meaningful.

他补充说，等待和稀缺感甚至会让布莱恩特最终给出的回复显得更有意义。

ChatTJB works because "it restores a human trace that highly scalable AI interfaces tend to remove."